TO-Tech Blog Todd Ogasawara’s Tech Blog

Instructions for Upgrading from Windows 7 Beta to RC

Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 blog has instructions for upgrading from Windows 7 Beta to the upcoming RC.

Delivering a quality upgrade experience

The primary advice is to reinstall Vista and then upgrade to Windows 7 RC. Um, ack! My Asus Eee PC 1000HA came with XP. So, their primary advice is a no-go for me. And, here's their slightly less ugly alternative instructions.:

Here’s what you can do to bypass the check for pre-release upgrade IF YOU REALLY REALLY NEED TO:

1. Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
2. Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
3. Browse to the sources directory.
4. Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000.
6. Save the file in place with the same name.
7. Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.