After downloading Windows 7 from MSDN Academic allience (blog to come soon) I burnt the ISO to a disk and went about formatting to install and test it out. However, shortly into the installation process an error message appeard stating that the drivers for the disk-srive (which windows was reading the disk from) couldn’t be found.

Again, google was my first source, but there were a lot of possible solutions but required a second CD drive and alterations to the motherboard (RAID related) which I didn’t perticularly want to do.

My solution was to re-burn the installation DVD using MagicISO (previously used Nero) and set the ‘mode’ to “Mode 2 / XA”. I also burnt the disk at a slower speed (x16). Reformatting again I awaited the dreaded error, but to my supprise it didn’t come up. Instead it went streight to the disk partition stage! Success!

I’m not sure if it was in fact a faulty disk or the burn method – Either way the installation completed perfectly and I’m now running Windows 7. Try MagicISO if all else fails, it just seems to work!