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• Windows 7 full install DVD won’t boot on some systems – Error 5

  Posted on October 17, 2009 at 09:26 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Reader JE writes:

  I am an MSDN subscriber and as such have early access to the new Windows 7 release. I decided after playing with it on my test machine that I would install it on my wife’s machine. She is currently running Vista and I thought I would do a clean, fresh install of Windows 7 rather than an upgrade.

  Easy enough, download the .iso file, burn it to a DVD, boot and install. Right?

  All went well up to the Boot stage where the DVD refused to boot. Instead it gave me some strange code 5 error message.

  JE searched high and low and finally discovered that the DVD was a good one, but for some reason it wouldn’t boot on his wife’s machine.

  After much searching on the internet I finally found this on the German unawave site:
  

  During the boot from the Windows 7 installation DVD on some PCs the error message “Error Code 5 – can not boot from disk” appears. Affected are primarily computer with older motherboards of the company “AsRock” or “MSI”. Other DVDs on these PCs can boot without problems; e.g. from a Windows Vista installation DVD. And the Windows 7 installation DVD is also OK, because this DVD can boot on other computers. Also the replacement of the DVD drive does not help. And booting from the USB stick does not help either. The error seems to be an incompatibility of “AsRock” motherboards with the DVD boot sector used by Microsoft in Windows 7 installation DVD.

  As luck would have it, I had an MSI motherboard.

  I followed their instructions which amount to pulling the boot sector off of a Vista install DVD and creating a new DVD with the vista boot sector and the Windows 7 files and all was well. It booted, it installed and no more problem.

  Every new version of Windows brings its own, uh, special challenges and you can expect Windows 7 will be the same. I’ll keep you posted on inscrutable problems as they come to my attention.

  Windows News DVD installation problem, Error Code 5, Windows 7