Most aggrivating 2 days of my life.

Okay, so this may be a bit dramatic but I've had a really long two days trying to replace windows 8 on my desktop. I re-formatted the harddrive using Gparted, and it still won't allow me to install windows 7, so I bought Zorin OS 7, because it's my favorite Linux OS, and neither my desktop nor my laptop (which will run any other linux OS) will accept it. I put the burned disc in, and it says that there is no operating system found (Did the same thing with a USB). Should I burn the whole ISO file or something? Extracting the files onto the disc from the Iso doesn't seem to work. The MD5sum matches what its supposed to, and I did test it on both VMware Player, and VirtualBox. I'm stumped, and have nowhere to turn to accept the forums at this point.

Hi,

when you download an ISO file, you must create a bootable disk by extracting the data from the downloaded files, simply copying the file to a disk is not enough, see this:

http://www.freeisoburner.com/

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofth ... sofile.htm

For USB install:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

For partitioning:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2601

Disable UEFI in Bios on Windows 8 rigs:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

I hope that that is enough for you to go on.

Regards Wolfman

Did you go into BIOS and disable UEFI/EFI ande 'enable' legacy BIOS? If you don't do this you won't get anything else on other than Win8:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5434

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5583

Wolfman wrote:Hi,

when you download an ISO file, you must create a bootable disk by extracting the data from the downloaded files, simply copying the file to a disk is not enough, see this:

http://www.freeisoburner.com/

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofth ... sofile.htm

For USB install:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

For partitioning:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2601

Disable UEFI in Bios on Windows 8 rigs:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

I hope that that is enough for you to go on.

Regards Wolfman

Thanks, I feel like a complete idiot for not knowing this when I should have. Though if I were to reset my hard-drive again it might crash, I've done it about 4 times in the past week. Just out of curiousity, do you think if I had that disable the copy of windows 7 I installed on the machine (succesfully) would have stayed? I got a copy on it, but when I restarted it it said no OS found.. I'll ask on Yahoo as well since this are linux forums.

It would have been good to see a screenshot of your partitions!

Hi Hale5555 This is how I made a trible boot between Win8, Zorin os7 64b, and Ubuntu 13.04. Maybe it can help you..http://www.zoringroup.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5583

hale55555 wrote:

Wolfman wrote:Hi,

when you download an ISO file, you must create a bootable disk by extracting the data from the downloaded files, simply copying the file to a disk is not enough, see this:

http://www.freeisoburner.com/

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofth ... sofile.htm

For USB install:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

For partitioning:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2601

Disable UEFI in Bios on Windows 8 rigs:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

I hope that that is enough for you to go on.

Regards Wolfman

Thanks, I feel like a complete idiot for not knowing this when I should have. Though if I were to reset my hard-drive again it might crash, I've done it about 4 times in the past week. Just out of curiousity, do you think if I had that disable the copy of windows 7 I installed on the machine (succesfully) would have stayed? I got a copy on it, but when I restarted it it said no OS found.. I'll ask on Yahoo as well since this are linux forums.

Hi,

you should be able to triple boot with Win7 & 8 and Linux, if you still have Win 7 there, you can repair the boot menu using either the recovery disk from Windows or the Live CD from Linux, the 3rd alternative is to download and keep a copy of "Boot Repair":

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

http://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/

http://www.howopensource.com/2012/05/re ... ve-cd-usb/

You need to create a bootable disk just like any other version of Linux using the downloaded Boot Repair ISO file.

Make sure that you set your partitions first and install Win 7 (already installed you said!) then Win 8 and finally Linux!, if you install Linux last, there is no need for Boot repair as Grub will be installed automatically!.

This is a bit dated but might be worth a read:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/120 ... dows-linux

Regards Wolfman