Windows 7: Clean install on new following hard disk failure

Hello,

I've had a look on the upgrade paths thread but i'm not sure it covers my particular scenario.

I recently installed a clean version of Win 7 Pro on my machine that had Vista Home Premium on originally. All was fine until my hard drive gave up the ghost and failed. I have another new hard drive in the machine and I wanted clarification on a few points:

With the new hard drive in, will my machine boot direct from the DVD as I have been unable to change the BIOS settings?



I have already registered/activated this copy of Win 7 (prior to hard drive failure). Will I be able to do this again or will Microsoft disallow it due to it already being registered?

I still have the Vista OEM sticker on my machine - will I need to input the code somewhere on installation?

If anyone could help, I would be very grateful.

Cheers, Scott

You own a retail copy of Windows 7 for life; it can migrate to whichever machine you want as long as it isn't on more than one machien at a time.

Boot from the DVD, select Custom Advanced drive tools and format the HD before installing.

Afterwards, run a Repair install from the new desktop and it will accept the key if you have an upgrade version. A repair install is an Upgrade over itself, which sees itself as the qualifying OS for Upgrade version use. There is another registry workaround online if you don't want to do this.

If your DVD fails to prompt to boot at startup, then you need to enter BIOS setup by tapping F-key given on first bootup screen, normally F2. Set DVD drive first to boot in BIOS setup. Or use the F-key given for Boot menu to trigger one-time boot from DVD.

Thanks for your reply Gregrocker and i'm sure it will be fine however, I now have a larger issue in that I can't get into BIOS. When my machine switches on (Dell Inspiron 530s) it only gets as far as the Dell splash screen and is not accepting any keystrokes from either a wired or wireless keyboard to allow me to get into the settings. Once I have this issue solved, i'll reinstall as per your advice.