Can't reinstall windows

[moonwhistle]

I formatted my spare laptop in order to reinstall windows 7. It was working ok before but was just a bit sluggish and needed a clean install. It shows the hard drive is formatted and goes as far as installing windows but then fails near the end and says it can't find something file or other. I know the windows disc is fine. I've tried it dozens of times and gone through all the options after booting from the disc but nothing works. I'm fairly positive the hdd is fine so perhaps the dvd drive doesn't work properly? It spins and reads the disc though. I formatted the recovery partition as I couldn't get it working and was using a windows on disc regardless.

This was a few weeks ago and I've not tried it since. I'd really like to get this laptop running again as I very much want to have a spare.

I even gave it to a more knowledgeable friend to try and he couldn't do it either.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[smouty]

You can create a USB bootable stick to install with if you think the DVD drive is dodgy.
There is a Microsoft program to help - http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/...usbdvd_dwnTool

[originalbadboy]

Did you actually remove the existing partitions, or just reformat them?

Try removing all the partitions and creating new ones assuming you dont want the data on the drive

[moonwhistle]

You can create a USB bootable stick to install with if you think the DVD drive is dodgy.
There is a Microsoft program to help - http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/...usbdvd_dwnTool

We already tried to boot from USB but couldn't get it to work unfortunately.

Did you actually remove the existing partitions, or just reformat them?

Try removing all the partitions and creating new ones assuming you dont want the data on the drive

I'm pretty sure we removed the partitions and it's now unpartitioned.

I'll need to go through the installation process again to check.

[originalbadboy]

If not then its either going to be bad media (windows install files), bad DVD drive or its possible there is a memory fault with the machine. I have seen issues like that before where there was a memory fault which was causing copying of files to abort for no real reason.

[moonwhistle]

Well I just tried it again so I could get a photo of the error message and the installation actually completed and worked! That's about 30 tries it took. I changed nothing this time so I'm at a total loss why it failed in the past.

Problem fixed. Thanks guys.