Full Disk to install activate via upgrade key

[sphericalpuma]

I have a question for everybody out there. I recently bought the full retail Windows 7 Home Premium, I installed it on my pc and everything is going great. I also have a copy of the upgrade offered to students and a valid key for that.

My brother wants to install Windows 7 on his comp (He's running windows vista premium 64) and I was wondering if I could use my Windows 7 installation disk to install it, and then just use the upgrade key to activate it? I want to do a custom (clean) install over windows vista, and then delete the windows.old folder.

I don't see a problem and a disk seems easier than that .exe file you get from downloading on digital river, so I was just wondering if it would work.

 

[gregrocker]

Apparently the Upgrade is a different product key which will not activate using the full version installer. Happened to me. When you start the UPgrade from Vista (as you must) full will do an Upgrade but doesn't do the activation check for underlying qualifying OS to proceed with Upgrade. It just does a full retail Upgrade and expects an activation key for that.

 

[djjaeger82]

FYI you can do a real clean install from an upgrade CD (booting from CD etc) if you want to. Just make sure you back everything up and that you don't delete the vista partition prior to launching setup. No worries you can in fact delete the partitions or completely format during setup, just don't do it before if you're installing with an upgrade dvd and key.

See my notes here:
http://www.sevenforums.com/installa...l-upgrade-windows-7-version-7.html#post323460