Comments on: Windows 7 – Cool, but no 64 Bit for me?

By: John N

John N — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:57:56 +0000

Win 7 supports *.VHD for mounting, which stands for Virtual Hard Drive. Seems akin to a .DMG (Disk Image) file in Mac OS X.

There will probably be a tool to convert ISO->VHD in no time.

By: Adi R

Adi R — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:00:15 +0000

PS: I did read somewhere that mounting ISO’s was supported in Win 7. Or perhaps it was general comment of “using virtual mounted drives”, but unclear what format file is supported for the “virtual drive”.

By: Adi R

Adi R — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:58:28 +0000

Interesting idea there with Vista drivers. I wonder if I can force it to use Vista drivers during the Setup step. I recall there used to be “load custom drivers” option there, when choosing destination drive for install.

I guess I should also add some details about my platform. I am on MSI P6N Platinum motherboard (nForce 650i) with Q6600 core 2 quad processor. 4Gb DDR2 ram, but I think I mentioned that.
Granted this platform isn’t the latest, but I really expected the quad core to last for a while, so looking forward to MS fixing this annoying issue in RC.

I’ll keep this post updated if anything further uncovered on this, keep the great comments coming!

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:49:18 +0000

I had the same problem with 64 bit version taking a long time to install. I was installing on brand new hard disks and have no intention of dual booting. The installation screens seem to take about 10 minutes each. I also have SATA drives and IDE, so if it is the SATA hopefully it is fixed. The SATA I’m actually doing RAID so installed the Vista version of the RAID drivers and Win 7 picked it up fine (just took a long time to get to). Anyways my point is that 64 bit installation seems to take forever when it shouldn’t.

AMD Phenom II quad 3ghz, 8GB RAM, (2) 150 GB 10k RPM drives.

The other problem I had was using System Restore within the Win 7 GUI. i.e. If using System Restore from the installation DVD/USB it works fine, however within the Win 7 gui it never stops loading.

3rdly – Microsoft should have included support for mounting ISO’s in Windows 7. Looking for a ISO mount software is what caused me to have to use System Restore.

PS> Send Feed back I wished worked.

By: Adi R

Adi R — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:33:15 +0000

Thanks for the input!

Actually, my DVD drive is IDE, but the Hard-drive where I was trying to install OS is SATA, so this explains things a lot.

Hmm, I do have a second hard-drive in that PC, connected over IDE also, as I recall. I may try it, or will wait for RC, whichever comes first (since I need to clear 20gb space, and that old drive is rather small).

By: Blake Coverett

Blake Coverett — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 07:02:41 +0000

Sounds like the same problem I had – I tracked it down to flawed support for my SATA attached DVD drive. Everything installed perfectly off a USB DVD drive, and when I submitted a bug report about it with details about my hardware they got back to me within a day confirming my guess. They promised it would be corrected by the RC release.