Windows 7 home premium family pack issue

Evil-I · 18 Dec 2010 at 18:00

Hi All,

It may be that I'm just being stupid here but I'm having a nightmare with a machine trying to install Windows 7 Premium from the family pack disk set.

First point, yes I'm aware this is an upgrade version, and yes I do own valid legal licenses of previous windows versions so this is totally legal and correct.

My issue is I've just swapped out the old 160Gb Sata drive in one of my media centres with a nice new shiny 1Tb Samsung F3 and of course as part of that want to do a nice clean shiny install of windows 7 (upgrading the machine from its previous vista home premium). The problem is that the windows 7 install fails when inputting the product code saying its invalid. I idiot checked the code multiple times and then did some googling.

Now from what I can gather this version will not do a fresh install without having a currently installed previous version, is this correct?

If so, does it really mean I will have to do a full install of Vista on the new hard drive before I can install windows 7? Surely there must be some sort of verifying previous versaion code or something?

Help!

E-I

Evil-I · 18 Dec 2010 at 18:48

Okay,

Found a way round it. Just in case anyone else runs into this issue, all I did was strap the old hard drive (with its vista install) back in as a secondary drive. In the setup process I pointed the install to the partition I'd set up on the new hard drive. It went through putting the serial code in fine.

Not sure if this will cause any issues later in the day, I'm going to pull the old drive from the machine and hopefully it will just carry on happily with its windows 7 install.

E-I

SiriusB · 18 Dec 2010 at 19:03

With your method you risk the Windows installer putting the MBR on the old HDD you intend to remove. You should make sure the new HDD is the primary boot HDD in the BIOS.

Another more long-winded alternative, which is approved by MS, is to install 7 without a Product Key [just leave it blank] then reinstall over the top again using the key. There is also a registry trick to avoid the second reinstall. LOADS of info on the web about this.

Evil-I · 18 Dec 2010 at 19:47

SiriusB said:
With your method you risk the Windows installer putting the MBR on the old HDD you intend to remove. You should make sure the new HDD is the primary boot HDD in the BIOS.

Agreed, luckily I had made sure that the new drive was the primary in the Bios so all appears to be good.