Why isnt the ISO I burned to a DVD bootable?

Question

I downloaded an ISO of Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit From Digital River to try to restore a laptop.

I downloaded the ISO and burned it to a Memorex DVD and tried to boot the laptop from it using the boot options but the laptop acted like there was no disk in the drive and booted from the Hard Drive like normal.

I tried another boot disk to see if it was the DVD drive but the laptop booted to that disk just fine.

Am I burning this disk wrong? Any ideas?

Lenovo g570

Solution

That's because you probably have not burned a boot sector or boot image on the DVD. The program you use to burn DVDs will have an option that you can check to burn a bootable DVD.

Judging from the screenshot on this page, it doesn't look like there's an option to burn a bootable disc in Windows Disk Image Burner.

If you can't do it with the built-in Win7 burner, these are two solid, free-to-use dvd burning programs, that might be more straightforward to use:

• CDBurnerXP
• ImgBurn

Comments

[John]

If you look at the disc on an existing computer, what do you see on it?

[MalwareManiac]

@john It has 5 folders labeled boot, efi, sources, support, and upgrade. Then it has 4 files, autorun.inf, bootmgr, bootmgr.efi, and setup.exe

[pleinolijf]

Please specify the application you use to burn the dvd.

[MalwareManiac]

@pleinolijf windows 7 burner

[MalwareManiac]

@pleinolijf yes and I didnt find anything that gave me a clue as to what went wrong

[pleinolijf]

Can you confirm that you burned the image as a boot image ? This is crucial information that you should add to your question.

[MalwareManiac]

@pleinolijf That is kind of the point of the question... how do I do that? I have an iso and I right-clicked and hit burn image. Do I have to change a setting somewhere? I dont see any setting in the windows 7 burner

[pleinolijf]

Hence my comment about looking that up online ;) Though I must admit it's hard with those keywords: "Windows 7 Disk Image Burner"...

[nerdwaller]

Very few drives still have this issue, but is there any chance you used a DVD+R instead of a DVD-R? Like I said, not terribly common of an issue anymore - but I know it has, at least a few times, caused issues for specific drives. (The Lenovo one didn't have enough spec information on their site to judge that).

[MalwareManiac]

Iam using a DVD-R

[nerdwaller]

While hopefully this works, I have never had an issue burning any bootable media from W7 Burner. Though, it doesn't have speed controls and everything that the others have. @MalwareManiac - When you re-burn, try doing it with a slower speed with verification selected as well. Sounds like just a bad burn, lower speeds tend to help avoid those.

[nerdwaller]

@MalwareManiac - Yeah, it sometimes just fails or the DVD is just poor quality so the laser doesn't encode it right or whatever. Windows kind-of failed in having options in their burner (probably trying to make it simple). The ones pleinolijf mentions should give you the extra control to help ensure a better burn.

[MalwareManiac]

I used a different dvd and a different burner and it worked! Thanks for the help

[Karan]

Yup, you just get bad discs or bad batches sometimes. I remember having used Windows to burn a setup DVD in a pinch and it booted just fine. However, I highly recommend ImgBurn.

[MalwareManiac]

@Karan yes I think I have a batch of bad disks because I tried to make a ubuntu disk the same way with the same memorex disks and it failed also. The second time I used verbatim disks and they worked great. Also used ImgBurn the second time and I think that will be my default burner from now on

[MalwareManiac]

Thks for your answer though that is not the case here because I used the same ISO with a different burner and disk and it worked just fine

[DavidPostill]

Welcome to Super User! Please read How do I recommend software for some tips as to how you should go about recommending software. You should provide at least a link, some additional information about the software itself, and how it can be used to solve the problem in the question.