Can i install drivers to a laptop with no operating system

[Guest]

Hello,

i was asked by a friend to have a look at his old laptop. It doesnt apper to have any drivers or OS installed at the moment (when you put in the windows 7 cd and asks you to pick a location to install it doesnt have anything there no hard drive detected)

is it possible to get the drivers and install them first so i can then go and install windoes 7?

thanks dave

 

[BlindmanNL]

It shouldn't be neccesary to have drivers installed for a Hard Drive to work properly. See if the hard drive is properly connected, if it is, it's probably just a broken one.

 

[Guest]

mmmm ok thanks for the reply and reply so quickly , haha thats me all out of ideas now

 

[Guest]

or should there be anything on the laptop to start with? because as its a clean harddrive there is nothing on it.

 

[Guest]

ok so i have restarted and booted from windows 7 disk and its found the drive now and created a new partion on it, now the install stops at 45% and says it cant find sources any ideas?

thanks

 

[Atanasov Goran]

how much GB is the hard drive?
how old? are you sure that you don't have bad sectors?

then if all is ok with the drive, then probably could be the controler driver(sata or IDE)
some controllers needs the drivers before the instalation of windows...

In windows 7, when ask you to choose the partition,
in the down side of that is an option "load drivers", and will let you search them in conected devices...

you can have your drivers inside the instalation cd,
or in a USB Flash and load then from there....
or even in the Hard drive... (Probably not for your case 😛)

 

[livebriand]

Chances are that the drive could have bad sectors. I got a machine that was around 8 years old and when I tried to do a full format (NTFS) in xp setup, it froze. When I did a quick format, it worked, and then Speedfan (in the SMART tab) told me it had thousands of bad sectors when I did the online analysis.

If it didn't have drivers, it likely wouldn't work at all. Depending on the age of this laptop, it may have an IDE HD (probably 2005 and back). The main issues were with XP regarding laptop SATA HDs.