I bought a PC with no OS. I downloaded windows 7 home premium from my MSDN subscription.

I put the Windows 7 installation DVD in the drive (ISO file I downloaded from my MSDN Subscription) and booted up the computer. I get a screen with 2 choices.
F2 Bios settings and F8

When I hit F2 Bios setup - I get a black screen with the message 'no active partition found'

I hit F8 and set the boot device to be the cd\dvd drive and when it tries to boot off the windows 7 dvd, I get the same 'no active partition found' error.

what do I have to do to install windows 7 on this machine?

Welcome to D-A-L.

Did you convert the .iso image file to a usable boot/installation file set?

Image Burn is a good program and it's free;

The Official ImgBurn Website

I was using 7ZIP to extract the ISO. I downloaded IMGBURN to convert the .iso image file to a usable boot/installation file set and it worked great! Thank you so much

Glad to help.

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