Posted on 10/28/2009 1:03:20 PM PDT by Boucheau
I was so hoping to have better news to share, but with all the conflicting reports and my own troubles testing this while on the road, it's been a messy 24 hours. However, after staying up late last night and working through a few different scenarios, I think I do have a (fairly) simple way to clean install Windows 7 with Upgrade media. That is, it should be easier than the old "install it twice" hack that I previously documented for Vista (though that should still work as well).
Put simply, the goal here is to clean install Windows 7 on a virgin, unused PC. You can boot and run Setup with the Upgrade media for Windows 7, but when you go to activate, it won't work.
Thanks to Kevin Fisher and a bit of testing, I have a simple workaround that does work.
After performing the clean install, ensure that there are no Windows Updates pending that would require a system reboot. (You'll see an orange shield icon next to Shutdown in the Start Menu if this is the case).
Then, open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:
HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
Change MediaBootInstall from "1" to "0".
Open the Start Menu again and type cmd to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose "Run as administrator." Handle the UAC prompt.
In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm
Then tap ENTER, close the command line window and reboot. When Windows 7 reboots, run the Activate Windows utility, type in your product key and activate windows.
Voila!
A couple of notes here.
Others have reported that simply installing Windows 7 using Upgrade Media and then activating just works. It certainly doesn't hurt to try this, but my guess is that there was a version of Windows on the hard drive that Setup detected, thus making the install and activation work properly.
I have not tested this yet, but I assume if you launch Setup from within your previous version of Windows, choose Custom, reboot, and then wipe out the previous Windows version during Setup, that that will work as well.
And I'm just about positive that the old "install twice" hack from Vista will work too.
I will test all of this thoroughly when I get home. But for now I wanted to cut through the baloney and cut and paste jobs out there and give you something that really does work.
Again, thanks very much to Kevin for this information.
Ping for later reference.
When I taught Network Admin classes (I was a Novell Master CNI), I used to tell my students, "nobody ever got fired for bad backups... Lots of people get fired for bad restores!" I used to teach them ways to test their backups and restores. I had more than one call from students who told me that they had been backing up their data for quite some time (in one case, more than a year) before they realized (after coming to my class) that their backups were completely useless.
Mark
An upgrade also works fine for Windows 7. The reason what he’s doing is a PITA is that he’s trying to con the OS to save money, he’s trying to use the much cheaper upgrade disk (intended only to be used on a machine with Vista already installed) to do a clean install which this disk was never intended to do. He’s giving himself migraines to save a hundred bucks.
How about I just stick with XP.
Of course, I do still have to install my new powersupply. I have to say this, I LOVE Corsair. I have a w750t beast, that I have had to replace twice. BOTH times, Corsair has shipped me a new one ASAP. No second guessing nothing. Just got me a new one. Of course my posting of the diesel sounding power supply on start-up likely helped. A Power supply that sounds like a Diesel is NOT a good thing.
That being said, I would rather dig int he guts of my PC reinstalling and reconnecting a Pwer Supply than to try and install win7 over my XP installation. I might never get back online again and would likely have to f-disk the whole damned thing. (BARF)
There are only ten types of people: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
bookmarking
Three types of people: those who understand math and those who don’t.
“How about I just stick with XP.”
I don’t have a problem with that. I have yet to upgrade this system to 7. I have it on several test machines, however, that we’ve been using for experiements for many months.
I like my old friend, XP. If you don’t want to upgrade, or need to upgrade, then don’t, yet.
There are only 3 types of people: those who can count, and those who can’t.
But they promised that this OS wouldn’t have the problems that Vista had. Well, technically, I guess they are right. It has whole new problems.
This OS does not have the problems that Vista had—not even close.
We didn’t sell new systems with Vista. Now, we’re selling quite a few Windows 7 machines, and I feel comfortable doing so.
When we sell a system and it doesn’t operate smoothly, we get blamed, not Microsoft. If I didn’t trust it, I certainly wouldn’t sell it.
Windows 7 should do quite well.
This is good for the computer user, and the economy.
I hope so. It seems that every succeeding Windows release is bigger, slower, and just as troublesome as the last. I wish that instead of just writing patches around faulty code they would write over it. There are probably tens of thousands of lines of worthless code in Windows.
Yep, you are right. It works better like this:
There are only 10 types of people: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
ep, thats mah theory! If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
This is about a hack for using upgrade media for a clean install, not upgrading from a running version of Windows. Regular upgrades from Vista or XP are simple and automated.
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