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How to install Windows 7 Professional Upgrade on a clean hard drive

October 14th, 2009 Comments off

A month ago, I wiped out one of my old computers that had Windows Vista on it. Since then I have been having a hard time installing Windows XP on it, so I decided I would try and install my Windows 7 Professional Upgrade on it. The computer has two hard drives wiped totally clean. The only thing I had was my Windows 7 Professional Upgrade DVD and needed to install it on my computer.

I was able to by doing the following steps:

Windows 7

Windows 7

I opened regedit and navigated to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/

Change MediaBootInstall from “1″ to “0″.

I went and typed cmd into the search bar and ran it as an administrator. I typed the following command “slmgr /rearm” (without quotes)

I rebooted my computer and went to activate Windows normally. It activated just fine. Of course, I had a copy of Windows XP that came on my Dell, so I was prepared to enter the serial key if needed. Fortunately, it was not needed and I was able to use the Upgrade DVD to complete a fresh install.

Thank you Microsoft!