installing windows 7 on a PC I bought with no OS

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?

 

Has the hard drive been formatted?
Might set the BIOS to boot from CD then the disk should format for you.

 

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 (ISO file on DVD) , I get the same 'no active partition found' error.

 

Check ALL connections from your hard drive to the motherboard.
Remove and reseat to ensure a good connection.

 

So is ANY hard drive showing in BIOS?

 

You say you have an iso file on the disk. So, are you saying you only have one file on your DVD? If so, you need to burn the image iso to the DVD using a program like Imgburn. Then you will be able to boot off of the DVD.

 

I reseated all of the connections. power up. I can feel the harddrive spinning up but when it tries to boot from the DVD ISO image, I get the same error 'no active partition'when i go into the Boot Menu, it does show the SATA harddrive.

when I go into the BIOS advanced Menu then drive configuration, it shows:
ATA/IDE Mode: Native
S.M.A.R.T. : enabled
SATA Port 0 WDC WD50000AKS (500.1GB)
SATA port 1 HL-DT-ST-DVDRA ATAPI
SATA Port 2: not installed
SATA Port 3: not installed

Primary Master: not installed
Primary Slave: not installed
Hrd Disk Pre-Delay : NO

 

Just follow tgell's advice. You have to use a program that can extract all the individual files the ISO contains and write them to the disk. Just copying an ISO is no use.

ImgBurn can do it; CDBurnerXP can do it; Nero can do it

 

i had used 7ZIP to extract the file from the ISO FILE and burned that to DVD.. i got the same error. I downloaded the software suggested here
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/ht/burnisofile.htm
called Free Easy cd DVD burner and it is now booting up off the DVD. Thank you for your help!!!!

 

You cannot use an archiver to extract files from the iso because there is a bootloader on the iso file that cannot be extracted. You have to burn the image with programs that Earthling suggested.

 

Don't see how that can be right plodr. It's seeing a Western Digital 500GB SATA drive. Master and Slave only have any meaning when IDE connected.