Inspiron 17R SE - clean install windows 7 ultimate through usb

these are my thoughts thus far on the issue of a clean install of windows 7 ultimate through a usb stick.

today morning, i was perusing the dell driver site and was wondering about all those drivers and how similar they all looked. eventually got fed up and took the plunge, threw caution to the wind and tried booting with a usb drive. guess what happened? it wont let me instal!! it was driving me crazy. i never had any difficulty anything trying to boot windows. have done it so many times and yet this one stumped me. the first error i got was that some drivers pertaining to my CD/DVD drive was not installed. i googled it and there were a few posts which said you gotta change the SATA to ATH (or something of that sort) and i did that from the bios and now i have run into this error:

Windows cannot open the required file D:\Sources\Install.wim... Error: 0x80070002

i was at my wits end

apparently, the usb drive also has to contain the sata drivers. got that from here (under step 6 - Step 6. Preparing SATA Drivers ):

Dell Community

however, after i downloaded the four SATA drivers/applications from the dell site here:

Drivers and Downloads | Dell [India]

I still had the same problem. i was looking for guidance from you fine folks when further research told me that the problem apart from the sata drivers could also be the usb3. an obvious way to bypass this is to install with a dvd. if you want to use a usb 2.0 stick with a usb 3.0 port, then the solution is to integrate the usb3 drivers into the stick (is integrate a fancy word for extracting the driver to the root of the usb stick...lets see).

so i downloaded about 12 driver files from the site above mentioned, which i thought were relevant and extracted all of them into their respective folders (used winrar), included them in the iso file and again burned it on to the usb stick. the result was still the same. so as of now, i have given up trying to install windows 7 afresh from usb. i took the trouble to record the developments so that a fellow traveler would benefit and perhaps even point out where i goofed up.

hoping to hear from you folks

 

this worked for the time being: but not yet on usb...will get back on that:

How do I do a clean install of Windows 7 on Dell Inspiron 7520 (a.k.a. Inspiron 15R Special Edition) - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

(see pg.2 therein)

What I did was to burn the device drivers extracted from 10.8_f6flpy-x65 folder into my retail copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate. The reason is that only the DVD drive, the hard disk drive and the mSATA disk are visible during the Windows 7 setup.

During Windows 7 setup, immediately after accepting Microsoft's license agreement, you are presented with a menu showing the available partitions on your hard drive(s). In our case, it is blank.

Click on "Browse" button to locate the Windows 7 DVD and then click "OK".

The name of the device driver "Intel Mobile Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller (D:\iaStor.inf)" will appear in the menu. Click "Next".

Your laptop will try to load it many times. It seems there is something that prevents it from loading. If you encounter the following message "Intel Mobile Express Chipset SATA RAID Controller (D:\iaStor.inf) device driver could not be installed. Contact your vendor for an updated driver" do not be disheartened. Continue to click "Rescan" as many times as necessary. After a few attempts, the menu refreshes and a list of available partitions on your hard disk drive(s) appears.

Proceed as usual with your installation of Windows 7.

 

IN SO FAR AS THE USB INSTALLATION GOES, I BELIEVE THE ANSWER IS HERE:

How To Mount and Inject Drivers into Windows 7 PE 3.0 | Commodore.ca | Windows

i went to the above page on account of this post:

Windows 7 install from USB - problem Sata drivers

(the last post in the page above)

this post from microsoft also details the procedure:

Add and Remove Drivers Offline