Creating a Bottable Windows CD for new Hard Drive

[waskhan]

Got a bit of a problem here.
I brought a New IDE Hard Drive to replace/upgrade my current one, the installation of that went fine.

When it came to installing Windows Server edition 2003 which i downloaded free from the Microsoft website it wouldn't load when i put it in the Hard Drive as it wernt a bootable CD or something like that.

is there anyway i can install the new windows on my new hard drive?

Thanks

[TAKTAK]

does the file you downloaded have the file extension .iso?

if so, burn it to a disc using a program called imgburn, as the iso is just an image of the disc

[waskhan]

yep there are 2 ISO files for 2 CDs,

will that automatically boot when i switch the PC on?

[TAKTAK]

yep there are 2 ISO files for 2 CDs,

will that automatically boot when i switch the PC on?

no

to boot from the CD you need to burn the ISO files using a program called imgburn, as this burns the files that are contained inside the ISO and not the ISO file itself

the ISO is basically a little case to hold all the files together in a handy package, but without extracting the files (imgburn will extract them for you) then your system won't recognise it as bootable.

then, to boot from the cd you MAY need to change the boot priority in the BIOS so that it tries to boot from the opical drive first instead of the harddrive

hope this helps

[waskhan]

i have extracted and put all the files on CDs and the The BIOS is right too its just the thing of the CD not booting. maybe because, it dont have bootable files in it.

[directhex]

i have extracted and put all the files on CDs and the The BIOS is right too its just the thing of the CD not booting. maybe because, it dont have bootable files in it.

don't extract! how was TAKTAK unclear?

a .ISO file is a partition - like a hard disk partition, using a particular file system (ISO9660 or UDF rather than FAT32 or NTFS on hard disks)

the ISO file is more than the sum of its parts - important data which can only be stored in the original ISO file is required in order to burn something which can be booted. like tearing individual pages from a book, throwing away the cover, then wondering why you can't work out the title.

you MUST use a program which will burn your ISO image *as* an ISO image. not as a single file on the disc, not by extracting the files inside the ISO and burning those - the ISO itself needs to be burnt to the disc.