| Issue | Likely Cause | Solution | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing" | No USB 3.0 drivers. | Use a USB 2.0 port OR recreate the USB with Rufus and add USB 3.0 drivers. | | PC boots to black screen after "Starting Windows" | Incorrect boot mode (UEFI vs BIOS) or missing storage drivers. | Change BIOS from UEFI to Legacy/CSM OR inject storage drivers. | | Setup cannot see the hard drive | Missing SATA/RAID driver. | Load driver from another USB during setup or set SATA mode to IDE/AHCI in BIOS. | | USB not booting at all | BIOS boot order not set or Rufus wrote in wrong partition scheme. | Recreate USB with MBR for BIOS-CSM. |
1. Overview Rufus is a utility that formats and creates bootable USB flash drives. For Windows 7 32-bit, Rufus is particularly useful because the official Microsoft tool (Windows USB/DVD Download Tool) often fails with UEFI systems or large USB drives. Rufus handles legacy BIOS and UEFI boot modes correctly.
This is the most important setting. Choose based on your target PC: