EggXpert

Okay i have been hearing mixed reviews on this to where half the people said that you can't use a Window 7 Ultimate UPGRADE disk and do a clean install with the RC and the other half says that you can because RC is a windows operating system.  Has anyone bought any of the Windows 7 Upgrade disk and clean installed over Windows 7 RC?

 im trying to figure out if i shud do the $30 Student deal. but thats an upgrade so i want to see if im going to have to buy the full version of Ultimate at $320

Yes, I did do that.

I booted from the upgrade DVD (Windows Home Premium 64 bit), selected custom install, selected advanced options or options, can't remember if it's advanced or not. At that point I deleted the volume that the 7RC was on and the other smaller partition that was on the disk and then put a brand new install on. I activated without any problem.

This may also be of interst to you.

I have been using Window 7 RC 64bit Ultimate since they released it and prior used the same thing in beta. I have heard a number of things people have done to install Windows 7 Clean on a hard drive. I wanted to put Windows 7 on a newly formatted drive. This is what I did.

I read this over at Windows Supersite: Windows Trick

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.

My plan was to do this trick and see if it worked but when I finished my install it was already done! Odd?

Anyway, I had Window 7 Ultimate 64bit RC activated on my hard drive. I purchased at Sam’s Club a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium Family 3-pack for $125 and put the 64bit upgrade home premium disk in the drive and rebooted the computer. It did the windows normal start up and when it can time to make the choice I selected CUSTOM and it gave me the option to format. I deleted and made new parts and formatted the drive. I continued with the file installation. When they asked for a KEY I skipped that and everything else I could skip, just entered in a name and pw for login. When windows was done loading up I updated and did several restarts until it was completely updated with any Windows provided updates including many hardware for the laptop. I went to check the regedit hack and it was already set to “0” so I just decided to try and activate Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. I entered in the Family Pack Key and it took a minute but it said that I was activated. I did a search for any Windows.Old and nothing was there.

A perfect clean install with RC! I did this to another computer with RC and all completed perfectly.

So there you have it, like many people my eye was on the Family Pack release to save some money and Sam’s Club has the best price in town. I was almost going to just get 3 OEM’s, glad I didn’t do that.

Note - seen this question asked all over: The Family Pack only contains one Key.

RC to Windows 7 using Upgrade

That is good to know. but what if the RC is expired in the future? OoO