No Clean Installs with Upgrade Versions of Windows Vista
By Alexander Grundner |
January 29th, 2007
Comments (1)
[UPDATED] For anyone who has been a longtime Windows user, you’ve probably gotten accustomed to doing a clean install every time your system started showing performance issues or just wanted to upgrade the operating system on top of a clean drive. Well, according to Ars Technica (via Gizmodo), “Upgrade versions of Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Starter Edition will not install on any PC unless Windows XP or Windows 2000 is already on the machine in question”. In other words, users can no longer do a clean install and provide their old Windows XP/2000 CD for verification during the upgrade process. Moreover, if you’re faced with a disaster scenario, where your hard drive completely fails, you’ll have to install Windows XP first then upgrade to Vista.
UPDATE 1: The statement from Ars Technica may not be fully accurate – see: Vista Upgrade Path. However, Ars Technica forum member WebHobbit responds to the claim that clean installs are available: “Yes, it will be clean AFTER setup starts to run, looks for the previous install and then formats. But this doesn’t help someone with a NEW HARDDRIVE.”
UPDATE 2: Gizmodo states: “Apparently if you buy an upgrade version of Windows Vista for your XP machine, Windows Vista will invalidate your XP key (so you won’t be able to set up a dual-boot option nor will you be able to use that version of XP on another machine). Not only that, but if you ever uninstall Vista, you won’t be able to fall back on your copy of XP anymore.”
UPDATE 3: It appears that DailyTech has found a workaround (via a Microsoft internal document) for doing a clean install. In fact, the workaround doesn’t even require an XP key!?! DailyTech writes, “There’s no telling why Microsoft left this loophole wide open with Windows Vista Upgrade DVDs, but this means that any retail upgrade DVD can be used as a fully functioning full retail copy of Vista.”
Tip: You might want to consider buying a discounted OEM version of Vista (full version) instead of the retail upgrade package. Unfortunately, the OEM version permanently ties itself to the motherboard model once registered.
Side note: If your going the route of upgrading to Vista, you’ll probably also want to bookmark RadarSync – a link directory to Vista compatible hardware drivers.
January 29th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
There are always ways around this. I remember with some previous versions of Windows you could just format the hard drive with /s to transfer system files and the upgrade disc would then install without and problems. Another version of Windows you could format /s and then create a folder called windows and then it would install