To cut the long, sad, pathetic story of an infuriating day and night short; it's almost 4 AM, I'm still working on a site, I have no bootable Windows 7 USB media with me and I need to reinstall W7 Pro on a couple of workstations. There are no disk images on the network here, so I decided at 1 AM that the easiest way around this problem was to make another one using a new USB stick; I had a couple of spares in the van. All I needed to do was download the W7 Pro SP1 ISO file, right? It's a while since I've had to do this, so I went to the Seven Forums and dug up the trusty Digital River links to W7 ISOs only to find that they've all been deactivated and you now have to provide a valid product key to download the software images. No big deal, I have three W7 Pro keys right here. Problem: The service doesn't work. With any key. It's flat. Out. Broken. USELESS. It gives some BS "System Error" message every time I try to validate a key to get the download link. I've since spent an hour on tech support chat with some chick from Microsoft who can type about as quickly as some of the 6 and 7 year olds I supervise in the computer suite in school, and she was so helpfully able to inform me after an hour of infuriatingly unhelpful chit chat that one of the keys is pirated and won't work even if I can get the OS reinstalled, and the fact that the other two won't verify are MSDN Tech Support's problem, so "log in with your MSDN subscription details and submit a ticket through their online support system". Oh, simple, except that I don't have a subscription! I have never experienced so much bull**** in my career whilst trying to obtain an ISO with three (I swear that none of them are pirated, they were all activated and running on a machine not two months ago) genuine keys. Why have they done this?! Why go screwing with something that was working perfectly before? I toyed with the idea of driving 90 minutes to get my bootable installer sticks and 90 minutes back, but I don't have time for that now, so I'm downloading it with a Torrent. That's right Microsoft, I'm downloading your OS ISO using a P2P service. If it doesn't work and I can't get these machines running by 9 AM, I quit. /rant
Yuck! What a nightmare. I'm old school and have a massive cd/DVD pack with just about every OS that has ever been seen. I haven't used digital river in a while and it seems pointless asking for the key when your going to have to enter a key in windows to activate anyway. I think your gonna need a lot of coffee today
I always used to keep a couple of standard ISO's for W7, Vista and XP in the car just for this sort of stuff. I can still get all the isos from here? http://www.w7forums.com/threads/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-image-downloads.12325/ Edit prof links are dead, guess those are what you will need.
I use bootable USB drives 99% of the time. I've had so much grief from them today that I would seriously consider going back to optical media! I'm sipping my 7th cappuccino of the day, trying to install W7 Pro on an ASUS EEE Box thing that will not play ball. I still haven't been to sleep yet, and managed to drive ~140 miles earlier without nodding off. Thankfully I'm back in the workshop for most of the evening, save for one delivery just down the road after 10pm, I will be staying here and wrestling with this annoying little net top! As I implied in my original post, I normally have a key for every version, with and without service packs, on me at all times. I had everything but what I needed last night, Windows 7 Pro with SP1; I'd left it plugged into a machine in the office when I left in a hurry Yeah none of those links work any more, I tried fruitlessly and failed to find a direct download link. All direct download links for ISOs have had the files moved or unlinked. I looked for ages last night and every forum and site I came to had dead links. Unbelievable... Those didn't work last night. I promise I found and tried them several times before posting this thread and they were broken links at that stage. If I didn't have bad luck I'd have none at all Anyway, I got there in the end. I converted the ISO that I downloaded via Torrent to a UEFI bootable USB stick and it worked fine. I was out of the branch just after 10 A.M, thankfully causing only minimal disruption to normal operations. The way I see it, Microsoft owe me a night's pay!
Bad luck Uni! I was doing the same thing today and had no joy - worked fine last week! Quick question while we're on the subject: once you've made a bootable USB, can you just copy it ad nauseam? Or do you have to do the old 'convert ISO to USB' thing every time?
Drop me a PM next time you find yourself in a pickle like this bro, I keep a lot of images in the cloud for exactly this reason and I would gladly have hooked you up.
AFAIK because it's a bootable device, you can't get away with just copying the files from one to the other. When I create a new version or integrate more updates into an existing one, I use Acronis to clone the disk from one to another and also fire an image of it onto my server as a backup. Thanks guys! As a result of this and based on your advice, I have copied my bootable disk images to my Google Drive and Dropbox folders so they're accessible anywhere and everywhere from now on. I never want a night like that again! (due to this and a couple of other pressing issues, my total working day between Tuesday and yesterday ended up being 46 hours. Still applying for 9-5's...)
Please will someone do me a favour? I have now found out that I can't download the ISO for Win 7 Pro 64bit as my serial number is one for the version that was pre-installed on my laptop, so if someone would be so kind as to direct me to a download, that'd be magic! I'd also like an ISO of Win 7 Ultimate 64bit if anyone has it, just to safeguard against this problem in the future.
To add insult to injury, I've just found a Windows 7 multi version ISO in the downloads folder on the laptop I had with me the other night
