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When I got my upgrade disks from Best Buy I ran home very excited to get it on my personal laptop and enjoy all the new MS goodness. When I ran the upgrade I ran into one small problem though. When I installed my Windows XP machine I did what I usually do and make a system partition that is only a few gigs, and the rest I use for a data partition. Of course the problem is that when you run the upgrade for Vista within XP you cannot do changes to the partitions. The way I got around this utilizes a flaw in the upgrade process in Vista.

I first backed up all the data on my laptop that I wanted to transfer over. Then I went ahead and ran the install from the Bootable DVD just like you find on my instructions for installing a fresh copy of Vista, with a few notable exceptions:

I left the activation key blank

And I made sure to uncheck Automatically activate Windows when I’m online

I completed the installtion as in the article making sure to configure my disk paritions in a way that was more acceptable to Vista.

After the first install finished, I ran setup.exe from the Upgrade DVD. Again I followed the instructions from the article above except for the following:

This time I entered the upgrade product key

And I then made sure to choose Upgrade instead of custom install

Once the second install was done, I reinstalled my programs and replaced my data from the backup.

As you might have figured out you could do this without having a license from Windows 2000 or XP, but it is not something I would recommend.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 1:21 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.