CD/DVD Driver Missing When Installing Windows 7

I, like quite a few others, got a screen asking me to supply a CD/DVD driver when installing Windows 7 RC 1 recently. There seems to be a lot of suggested ways around it, one suggests it is a corrupt ISO download, another is that burning at a slower speed works. I knew my DVD was fine because I’d installed it on another machine recently.

In the end, my problem came down to me using a SATA hard disk and a PATA/IDE DVD-RW drive. Changing the setup in the BIOS from AHCI to SATA didn’t make any difference, and the DVD-RW drive was found in the BIOS no problem, but no matter what I used I couldn’t get past the driver request, I couldn’t load it from any of the OS disks I had.

In the end, simply swapping over to use a SATA DVD-RW drive worked and I was able to install it, so it looks like it might have been an issue using PATA and SATA together.