Windows 7 student upgrade install problems

mightypants said:

I clicked okay and now it says "select the driver to be installed and a loading bar keeps cycling through and I'm getting the spinning cursor. Any thoughts?

I expect this is due to lack of support for Win7 in Boot Camp. To be fair, Apple say that they will support Windows 7 in Boot Camp in Snow Leopard by the end of the year (hope you haven't got one of the unsupported MacBook Pros like I have):
About Boot Camp and Windows 7

So I'm not sure you'll get it working in Boot Camp at the moment. If you're keen to try Windows 7, it'll have to be as a virtual machine. If you don't want to pay for Parallels or vmWare, try VirtualBox. I believe that supports Win 7. To be honest, unless you're playing games in Windows so need to boot natively for full performance, a virtual machine will bring you one step closer to severing your links with Windows anyway. It's how I use my Mac!

Once you have installed as a virtual machine, the next problem will be authorisation, as you'll have no access to a previous Windows installation to authorise your upgrade. So, to authorise Windows 7, you'll need to follow this guide:
http://community.winsupersite.com/bl...he-answer.aspx
I've just tried this out, and it works!

I'm debating about taking advantage of the Windows 7 Ultimate Steal for students, but after reading all these messages, I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle.

If I buy the student deal, would it just be easier to download a Windows 7 installation ISO from a torrent site to use with the product key from the student deal? Will the product key from the student deal work with a regular install DVD?

ryandk said:

If I buy the student deal, would it just be easier to download a Windows 7 installation ISO from a torrent site to use with the product key from the student deal? Will the product key from the student deal work with a regular install DVD?

Yes, it would potentially be easier, but you open yourself up to two problems.
1. Do you trust iso installers that you download from torrent sites? How do you know that it hasn't been messed about with? Say, for example, capture your product key and send it to someone else?
2. I'm sure it would be against Microsoft's EULA to redistribute an iso on a torrent site. While I personally have nothing against this, I still wouldn't do it. And more and more people are getting caught doing this.

It really isn't that difficult to 'roll-your-own' iso, and burn a DVD installer. If it seems like too much hassle, buy the student version and order the disk set. At least you'll know your installer comes straight from Microsoft, and for me that's worth the peace of mind.

Ginjaian, thanks for all the help. I know that Apple doesn't officially support W7 with boot camp, but many people are using it without problems. I got past that last problem by rebooting and starting the installation again, but now I've encountered a new problem (surprise!). Installation begins and everything seems to be going fine, then the computer begins to restart as expected, but it ends up rebooting in OSX. Any ideas?

Yes, I was wrong about NO ONE being able to install Windows 7 in boot camp. It turns out that only some Macs can install the Win7 64 bit version at the moment, and Apple will add more later with an update to Boot Camp; see list here (says Vista, but should also be okay with Win7):
Boot Camp: Mac computers that work with 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista

There's a good write up of installing Win 7 here, but I assume they're using the 32 bit version:
How to Survive Boot Camp (and Run Win 7 on a Mac) - Boot Camp - Gizmodo

Now, to your actual problem, which I think is covered in the guide above. To select which OS to boot, you need to hold down the option/Alt key, literally as you press the power button. This gives a choice of boot disks, Mac OS will be one, Windows will be the other. This might be the same as how you were getting into your old Vista boot camp installation.

Hope that helps!

Okay, I finally got everything working. My last problem was apparently caused by the fact that I had rebooted directly from the burned disc, rather than going from the Boot Camp setup assistant.

Bonus: I was able to activate without any workarounds. That was good news.

wallyinnc said:

Mightypants, thanks for sharing your results and welcome to the Dark Side!
Ginjaian, good job

HAHAHAHA. "Dark Side" is the name I gave to my Vista Partition. To be fair, I started out using PCs/Windows and have continued to do so even though my main setup is Mac OSX at this point.