How to reinstall over a corrupt Windows 7 upgrade

[ruggedtoast]

Hi

I bought an Acer laptop last year for my wife, which had an OEM install of Vista. There were no recovery disks but on first use the machine prompted me to burn some sort of backup disks, which I duly did.

Later I applied for the free Windows 7 upgrade disk which I installed as an upgrade from within Vista, leaving all the preinstalled programs and what have you intact.

All was well for a few months but yesterday it crashed and Windows wouldnt boot up again.

None of the repair options worked so in the end I tried Ubuntu from a dvd which worked fine and (thank goodness) enabled me to rescue some files I hadnt backed up. So as far as I can see the hdd is alright.

I dont know how to proceed reinstalling a Windows OS though, and am worried about invalidating my product key.

Can I just put the Windows 7 upgrade disk in and instruct the machine to load from this at startup or wont this work?

I have whatever the rescue disks were the machine made me create when first used but understand from reading about that these Vista ones will now be invalid.

Many thanks

toast

 

[ickymay]

check out this great Tut from brink

 

[ruggedtoast]

Thanks - looks like I should just be able to pop the upgrade disk in at start up.

Fingers crossed!

 

[richc46]

The excellent tutorial that you were given will allow you to do a clean install. After it is done, and you are activated reinstall your programs. After you use the OS for a while make a system image that is stored on an external hard drive. If you update ocassionally, you will never have to reinstall or activate, again. Good luck.

 

[theog]

When you have reinstall Win 7, you download all the Acer software & drivers from here:

Acer Europe - Service & Support, Drivers & Utilities, Downloads

 

[gregrocker]

The Acer Win7 upgrade DVD is bootable so you can do the cleanest possible install: boot DVD, select Custom>Drive tools to delete all partitions, repartition as you wish, then format before installing Win7 to first partition.

The installer is mostly driver-complete but any missing drivers can be found at link theog provides above. I would not replace drivers given unless performance dictates.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html
There are screenshots of the process here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1649-clean-install-windows-7-a.html

The DVD will scan the HD to see another OS present to allow use of the Upgrade key. If not, use the workaround given in ickymay's post.