hey there, Im new here, but I do have a fair amount of experience in computers. I have a question for everyone though. Its been driving me nuts. About a month ago, my dads desktop crashed (he doesnt do any kind of maintainance or anything, he thinks if you spend any kind of money on a computer, it should just take care of itself, and as im sure many of you have experienced, its enough to make you throw up.) He is just going to buy a new one, so I took the old one to try to update it and make it a nice home machine. (I have a nice laptop for school, but im into a little online gaming, im working on learning coding, and I enjoy learning about and trying out little technology hacks and whatnot, so i want a decent desktop to suit my needs.) Here is the problem Im up against. when it crashed, and we rebooted, we kept getting an error about some missing file, I dont remember what file it was, but I do remember it was something related to the registry, a dll file of some kind. now heres where it get interesting; my grandpa is a computer whiz (you know the kind, octacore processor already reserved, always the newest technology and software, he works for the FAA as an expert witness and forensic toxicologist so, naturally he needs a powerful machine.) he had an extra copy of vista lying around, so we took it to use on the drive. I wiped the crashed drive completely, full format. when I went to install the vista disk, I kept getting the same error. now,I talked to my grandpa and we agreed that the drive was probably bad (under the assumption that if I had formatted it, and it was empty, it shouldnt say that any files were missing, it should just run the installation of vista. which brings us to the next interesting bit, I formatted it once again, and wiped all partitions off of it (its from an hp computer, so it had the recovery and hp tools partitions.) and I plugged it up, and made a custom stand to use as an external for my laptop, I am currently using it. I havent had any problems writing to it, or reading from it. It has worked just fine. Now, here's what I want to do; the IT Department at my school gives free microsoft software (office 2010, windows 7 enterprise, etc.) I want to install the windows 7 os to the harddrive i am currently using as an external, and put it back into the desktop computer. However, the software from the IT department is available for download off the schools site. What I want to know is how do I go about installing the os to the drive if I have it as a digital copy, and not in disk form?
any help at all is greatly appreciated. thank you for reading!
any help at all is greatly appreciated. thank you for reading!
