Anyone who, like me, ordered a download copy of Windows 7 through someone like Digital River, will find that although they have all of the files, they don’t have a way to make a bootable disc. For the benefit of those who have not come across this, your download doesn’t come as an ISO, you just get all the files packaged up. Given that upgrades aren’t meant to be possible from Windows XP, you would think that the very least this distribution would do is allow you to create a bootable DVD so that you can do the full install from scratch.
The good news is that there are ways to turn your downloaded files into an ISO that can be burned to disc and can be booted from. After a bit of digging I discovered this extremely helpful article at My Digital Life, which worked perfectly for me.
The bad news is that the process can be somewhat lengthy if you don’t already have the Windows Automated Installation Kit installed on your machine. Despite the fact that you only need one tiny file called oscdimg.exe, the only way to get this is to download and install the WAIK for Windows 7 (the link to oscdimg.exe on My Digital Life isn’t working). Bearing this in mind, at 1.7Gb, the WAIK is huge. There are a lot of fancy things you can do with the WAIK, but if all you want is oscdimg.exe then this is a truly excessive download. Not only that, but it comes as an ISO, so you either waste a DVD disc or you use something like ISOBuster or PowerISO to extract the files onto your computer. Then you need to install the WAIK – use WAIKX86.msi if you are using a 32bit version of windows. The rest should work just like the instructions in the aforementioned article.
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