Quick Bitlocker Question

Bry · 19 May 2010 at 18:41

A friend of mien has a vista 64bit laptop ultimate with the hdd encrypted via bit-locker.

He wants me to upgrade it to Windows 7 Ultimate. I dislike doing upgrades and want to do a format and fresh install.

My question is do I need to decrypt the drive via bit-locker in order to do a clean installation of windows 7? Or because it is software encryption I will just be able to boot from a windows 7 CD and do a full fresh install as normal?

P.s. reason for posting this here is that I think a lot more enterprises will of used bit-locker before as it is not a home feature.

atomiser · 19 May 2010 at 21:50

fairly sure there isn't an upgrade option to 7, so you're only option would be a fresh install anyway. grab whatever data you need off the drive, and then just install over the top formatting the drive along the way.

tntcoder · 19 May 2010 at 22:44

Bry said:
Or because it is software encryption I will just be able to boot from a windows 7 CD and do a full fresh install as normal?

Correct, just boot off dvd & fresh install, no need to touch bitlocker first

Bry · 20 May 2010 at 18:01

tntcoder said:
Correct, just boot off dvd & fresh install, no need to touch bitlocker first

Excellent thats what i as hoping for.

Cheers

jpmonkey69 · 10 Jun 2010 at 13:34

atomiser said:
fairly sure there isn't an upgrade option to 7, so you're only option would be a fresh install anyway. grab whatever data you need off the drive, and then just install over the top formatting the drive along the way.

You can upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista, but Vista has to have SP1 installed, you can't upgrade between 64 and 32 bit (and vice versa) and you can only upgrade to an equivalent or higher version of windows 7. (so you can NOT upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Professional, but you CAN upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424325(WS.10).aspx