I bought the $30 student version of Windows 7, and had a ton of trouble when I downloaded it. The download was famously stupid. Rather than making an ISO file, the download made a folder on your hard drive. Obviously, this didn’t do me much good, as I was wiping my drive to upgrade to a 64 bit OS. It didn’t take long to find a workaround, where I could take the extracted data and turn it into an ISO then burn it to a fine disc. Great.
So, I wipe my drive, install Windows 7, and notice when it’s all done that… my onboard ethernet port seems to be not working. Google to the rescue.
Yes, my mobo, a ASUS P5NSLI, can’t actually handle 4 or more GBs or RAM. I took out 2 gigs, and it worked fine. Put them back in, and NO GO. There seems to be no workaround, aside from getting a PCI NIC, which I did.
Strikes me as more of an “Awesome ‘Reading the Back of the Box Your Motherboard Came In’ Problem.”
It seems weird to me that the motherboard would know what to do with the four gigs in it, though. Do you remember how much RAM Vista said you had? I think 3.25 GB is what 4 GB usually shows up as on a 32-bit version of Windows. I don’t know why it would support that much, and only use part of one stick, when the RAM installed was more than the motherboard could take.
Unzip and move oscdimg.exe to your System32 directory (likely to be C:\Windows\System32)
Open an elevated command prompt. In Vista you do this by typing ‘cmd’ into your ‘Start Menu’ and hitting ctrl+shift+enter.In XP, just type ‘cmd’ into the Run dialogue (Windows Key+R or from your Start Menu).
Type (or copy and paste) the following into your command prompt (this will vary a little, depending on where you’ve put your expandedSetup folder):
oscdimg.exe –u2 –b"C:\expandedSetup\boot\etfsboot.com" –h “C:\expandedSetup” C:\WIN7.ISO
Ta’da! You’ve got a burnable ISO!
All you need to finish the job is a good burning application like ImgBurn, CDBurnerXP, or InfraRecorder. For this particular task I’d recommend ImgBurn – then just right click the ISO file and start the burn from your context menu. Or launch ImgBurn and choose “write image file to disc” — your choice!
No DVD burner? If you have a 4GB USB flash drive handy, check out this app!
edit - issues quoting, which I will blame on Windows 7 … despite the fact that this PC uses XP ;)
Ran into this same problem this weekend while upgrading a friend’s P5NSLI-based box to Windows 7 x64… first Windows 7 issue I’ve seen in 6 system upgrades… just slapped another NIC card into the box and everything is fine now.
How does one retrieve a product key for the student upgrade version? The Digital River FAQ says it is included in the order confirmation email and on the order info page, but apparently that’s not true for some of us.
Edit: After researching a bit more, it seems the Digital River FAQ is actually referring to a third email I did not receive, which they call the “confirmation email”. I was confusing that with the second, “order confirmation” email. (Not that this really changes anything).
Turns out lots of people didn’t receive the third email, and others received it but there was a blank line where the product key was supposed to go (one of many threads on the issue). Digital River has a customer support webform but the phone (952-253-1234) is probably best.
This is the first time I’ve purchased an ASUS product, and, given what I see as far as support options and so forth, it’ll probably be the last time, too.
The Microsoft/Digital River is a royal fuckup. The upside is that it looks like it’s the full version of Win 7 Pro and not the upgrade flavor. I bought the 64bit version and not once did it ask to see my XP disk during the install.
