What would stop WIN 7 installing properly?

[Gattopardo]

Have usb copy of win 7 that has been edited so installs all version 32bit of win7.  Have used this to install win7 on several computers, and it has been fine.  Went to install on an acer laptop but could not get the win7 to install properly as all the drivers seem to be missing including the ones to connect on the internet.  Reinstalled win7 from the restore partition and it comes with all the bloatware as well as norton and mcaffee to really annoy things.

Wonder what is happening, seems a bit odd.  Any ideas what happened? 

[Afasoas]

It's just wildly possible that Acer have used devices which are not supported by the default Win7 drivers?

I've only ever found this preventing an install when specific drivers are needed for either a RAID controller or a PCIE SSD. If I recall, the installer should ask you to insert media requiring any additional drivers it needs. Unfortunately I'm not 100% certain on that.

[Feanor]

Like Afasoas says, it will be down the drivers.

The drivers bundled with Win7 can only be for hardware which existed at that time.
So typically, when installing it on newer hardware, you may find certain things banged out in Device Manager.

The usual suspects are :
Network and WiFi;
Sound;
Video.

Most PC manufacturers will let you download the latest drivers for these components from their website.
Obviously, you need to use another PC and a USB stick to transfer them if one of the missing drivers is the network.
Or have pre-downloaded them before nuking the system from orbit.

If the PC manufacturer does not provide these as downloads, you can usually get drivers from the manufacturers of the actual hardware components.
You may need to re-install the original recovery image to get into device manager to determine the actual hardware.   These will likely be:

Network: Usually Intel / Broadcom / Realtek.
Sound: Intel / Realtek
Video: Intel / nVidia / ATI

All of these manufacturers provide drivers on their websites.

[Gattopardo]

It's just wildly possible that Acer have used devices which are not supported by the default Win7 drivers?

I've only ever found this preventing an install when specific drivers are needed for either a RAID controller or a PCIE SSD. If I recall, the installer should ask you to insert media requiring any additional drivers it needs. Unfortunately I'm not 100% certain on that.

The install went through but with just the a generic video driver, even on the other installs what usually happens is a generic driver is installed that makes use possible and then when there is an win update, but this time nothing.  It was just odd.

[Gattopardo]

Like Afasoas says, it will be down the drivers.

The drivers bundled with Win7 can only be for hardware which existed at that time.
So typically, when installing it on newer hardware, you may find certain things banged out in Device Manager.

The usual suspects are :
Network and WiFi;
Sound;
Video.

Most PC manufacturers will let you download the latest drivers for these components from their website.
Obviously, you need to use another PC and a USB stick to transfer them if one of the missing drivers is the network.
Or have pre-downloaded them before nuking the system from orbit.

If the PC manufacturer does not provide these as downloads, you can usually get drivers from the manufacturers of the actual hardware components.
You may need to re-install the original recovery image to get into device manager to determine the actual hardware.   These will likely be:

Network: Usually Intel / Broadcom / Realtek.
Sound: Intel / Realtek
Video: Intel / nVidia / ATI

All of these manufacturers provide drivers on their websites.

Suspect the next time I do a reinstall on the machine, I will obtain the details and then get the drivers.  But the strange thing was that both the wireless and plug in network port didn't work.  It was odd.

[Dibdib]

No wifi on this PC, but the Win7 installer doesn't have the drivers for the network chip on this motherboard either. I've got them on a CD somewhere, but I usually forget where I put it and end up scrabbling in a cupboard for either a USB wifi dongle or a thumb drive and another PC.

Just one of those things. Its predecessor had a SATA controller that Windows didn't recognise, so an OS install usually meant an old floppy drive balanced somewhere inside the case until the install was complete.

[Gattopardo]

Seems odd as the lappy was shipped with win7.  Actually more than odd it was/is annoying.

[pcolbeck]

Seems odd as the lappy was shipped with win7.  Actually more than odd it was/is annoying.

Its possible to produce anon standard Windows install CD that includes all the extra drivers.manufacturers (and corporates) do this all the time. A proper Acer copy of Windows 7 media for that laptop would have had the drivers included. As has been said new hardware is released all the time and a base install Windows 7 CD wont support the new hardware.

[Feanor]

As pcolbeck says, it's not in the slightest bit odd.

A win7 original install disk will date from July 22, 2009.
Hardware manufacturers had the ability to provided win7 drivers to MS for bundling with the OS ahead of this date.
So win7 shipped with drivers for a snapshot of hardware that existed in 2009.

Hardware released later than this would not be supported in the OS itself: you'd need to download and install drivers manually.

This is the situation that both the laptop manufacturer and you face.
And you both need to resolve it the same way.
You need to obtain the drivers and install them.

The laptop manufacturer would have installed the new drivers, then take an image of the machine, complete with all the new drivers etc, and deploy it to all their other machines.
A custom install.
That's what you get from the recovery option.

You don't need to use the recovery option: just use the base Win7 install, and then install the necessary drivers yourself.