Windows 7: Vista upgrade to Windows 7 Pro OA

Hi, I'm wondering if it is possible to do an upgrade of Vista to Windows 7 Pro using the Dell Recovery media without losing everything? The situation is like this. My buddy bought 2 Dell machines over time, 1 Vista (old PC) and 1 Win 7 Pro (new). He got rid of the older Vista PC and kept the HDD because the programs and settings on it are big hassle to reinstall and wants to replace the Windows 7 HDD with the Vista one (which is also a much bigger HDD) but upgrade it to Windows 7 Pro. The now unused Win 7 HDD will be the secondary data drive after formatting it (Dell recovery partitions and media are not needed on that HDD anymore, recovery media has already been created).

How can I do this? I have a retail Win 7 Ultimate for one of my other machines, should I use it to upgrade his system and just change the product key to the Win 7 Pro OA one or can I use the Dell Recovery Media? I don't want my license to end up on 2 different machines.



Jeremy

You don't say what the Vista version is. The only in-place upgrade path to Windows 7 Professional is Vista Business. There may be a workaround however. Worst case is you'll have to Clean Install Windows 7 which is a superior install anyway.

Extract the ISO from your Windows 7 DVD using ImgBurn or download the latest from Digital River official Windows 7 ISO page. Run the eicfg removal tool to unlock all versions then burn another DVD using ImgBurn at 4x speed.

Back up your files and a Vista backup image if you want a path back.

Boot into the Vista OS, put the Windows 7 DVD in drive, choose Home Premium, run the in-place Upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium.

From the Windows 7 desktop, type regedit in Start Search box, rightclick result to Run As Administrator, browse to the two Registry keys shown to change them to exactly as shown in screenshot below. This tricks the installer into doing an in-place Upgrade to Professional since it thinks it's doing a same-version Repair Install.

click to enlarge

Sorry it is Vista Home Premium. Thanks for the helpful links I didn't realize the locked nature of the Windows 7 discs. I tried the upgrade already and it got stuck at 18% uncompressing files during the install after the first reboot. So I'll restore the CloneZilla image I made and try again with your steps and post back if it works or not. Clean install makes sense but thought I'd still give it a try for my buddy and if it all goes badly the system is backed up.

Jeremy

In the end I did manage to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional and it works great but I first had to uninstall Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010. There was no error related to this but a DRM error and bluetooth error in the C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log was mentioned as a tip in a comment on a blog post I read. After that I did an in-place upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium to Professional. I had done some Windows Updates prior to the upgrade from Home to Pro which was a mistake because I had to do them again I edited the registry according to Hack to In-Place “Downgrade” from Windows 7 Ultimate or Professional to Less Premium Editions « My Digital Life to do the upgrade (basically change the edition and version in the registry).

Forgot to add that the DELL OEM key on the PC didn't work for the Anytime Upgrade (which I tried before the in-place one) but the in-place one worked because it needs it during the install (I didn't give it a key on the Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade at the outset, it was using the original older Vista one). At first it said it wasn't activated but when I checked it and asked to do it again it succeeded. Thanks again for the help!

Jeremy

Did you even read the steps I gave you just above to change the versions from within Windows 7? Why do you ask for help here to just ignore it, then go find the old version of the workaround on the web? I spent quite awhile typing out every step for you in detail which were right in front of you.

Don't get all hot'n'bothered! Sorry buddy but to the contrary your reply was extremely helpful and that's why I thanked you! I followed your steps and wherever I had problems I searched elsewhere. For example your detailed reply doesn't address my AV problem nor could it since you didn't know and that is because one of my posts is missing in these replies about being unable to see the image and my problem installing the upgrade. The image which you attached is not viewable and the post that you linked was not obvious to me what to edit so I had to look for a better page on the edit for the registry. Although you called it old that is the only one which worked since I'm using an OEM key the Anytime Upgrade cannot work as I said.

Jeremy

See if you can see the image now which I attached instead of pasted. I assumed you could see it since I could.

I understand now why you sought out the tutorial associated with it - which has unnecessary components associated with the Windows 7 RC which can be confusing so I stopped linking it years ago.

Anyway thanks for reporting back and glad it helped.

We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials for the most part here, although Kapersky is good if you need to pay.

I could see the image the first time that you posted it, linked from http://icrontic.com/uploads/2009/10/...r_registry.png but hadn't clicked on it since I was still following your previous steps but a day later it stopped appearing and I rechecked it (posted a reply which disappeared about it as I was getting a connection reset error from their server) just prior to my post above and it still wasn't working. Now I do see the image and the icrontic site seems to be the culprit.

I also recommend MSE, my buddy had the free Kaspersky I think and he was fine to continue using MSE

Once again thanks for the help, this forum has been a great resource for my Windows 7 trials

Jeremy