So I spent an utterly infuriating night last night tracking down what seemed to be a case of missing drivers for my RAID adapter. I was trying to install Win7 and it wasn’t detecting my drive and none of the drivers I tried (from all over the web) would work. I spent some hours banging my head against the wall.

In the end, as a final attempt at resolution I tried installing from a USB thumb drive. Turns out I had mis-burnt my Win7 ISO despite using the same USB CD Drive to burn as I was using to install. Given that a 4GB USB thumb drive can be had for basically nothing these days. Given that a USB thumb drive install is oodles of times faster. Given that I wasted a good $500 of my time last night.

You’d be a mug not to follow these instructions and install from a thumb drive!

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/21/seven-steps-to-a-bootable-windows-7-thumb-drive/

I have had similar issues with Vista installs where it silently or obscurely fails based on the ‘quality’ of the DVD burn. And before you ask I use branded media.