I bought new hardware a week ago and I decided to try windows 7 64bit. After putting it all together I tried to install Windows 7 which was going for a while then it started to complain about the DVD Driver and the installation process stopped. This error usually happens when you have an old DVD drive which is no longer supported by Windows 7 64bit. Well I have a 5 year old Benq DW1620 DVD drive. After browsing the forums and finding no useful information on this apart from buying a Windows 7 compatible DVD Driver I decided to try a different approach: Installing Windows 7 from a USB key.

This magically solved the installation problem and the DVD drive is now working properly under Windows 7 without any additional tweaking.

To install Windows 7 from a USB key follow this guide

Please watch out for the following things while using this guide:

• If you use XP the diskpart utility will NOT show your USB keys. So instead of doing it from diskpart you can complete the relevant steps from the Disk Manager. The easiest to start the Disk Manager: Click Start > Run and type diskmgmt.msc in the Open line and click OK. The Disk Management snap-in will open.
• If you do not have the relevant bootsect.exe ( 32 bit version for 32 bit Windows 7 and 64bit version for 64bit operating system ) you will not be able to create the bootdisk. To fix this download the relevant version of bootsect.exe.