[Solved] Re-installing of Vista Home Premium.

Not correct. You can reinstall Vista using your OEM key - you can use it on that system as many times as you need (but only that system - OEM licenses are not transferable to other systems)

After a few activations the internet based activation may fail and you will need to phone M$ to get them to manually activate it (quoting numbers)

but tbh, Vista sucks.

 

The safest way to proceed would be to image your current setup. You can use Acronis or if you have a Western Digital or Seagate hard drive, they both offer OEM versions of Acronis at no charge, as in free. There are other programs that will do the same thing, i.e. Macrim Reflect.

I'm assuming that you have one large partition now as your C: boot drive. If you have some empty space then you can shrink the boot volume and create another Data drive (D)

To do this start up Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Right click your boot drive, and select Shrink Volume. Depending on how much stuff you have on C: will determine how much you can shrink it. For this example, lets assume you have a 500GB drive with 300GB free. Vista should let you shrink the volume by at least 150GB. If you have a larger drive, so much the better.

Once you shrink the drive, set up the free space, and do a quick format of the new drive. This is where you will keep the images of your original Vista setup and the incremental images of your Windows 7 setup. It might look something like this:



Then you can create a directory structure for your data files. Probably easiest just to drag your entire MY Documents folder from the C: to D: you can also copy any other data files that might be stored elsewhere on your C: to backup Drive D. Getting the all the data files off the C drive keeps it small and manageable. You can always put them back if you want. I've always stored all the data on D: and only the programs and operating system on C:

When I did mine, I made an image of my Vista setup, then booted off a spare hard drive, and formatted the C: Vista drive. Then you can install Windows 7 from the DVD on a blank formatted C:, or you can just boot off the Win 7 DVD and install it directly over the Vista installation. You will probably have to re-install most if not all of your software, so I'd just let Windows do a clean installation. I've never had much luck with the Upgrade route.

Once Win-7 is installed, create a base image. Then run Windows Update and there will be over 100 of them. Once that is done, make another image of C: and then install your software, and make another image. When everything is up and running the way you want it, make a final image. Then install Daz;s loader and make a final-final image. Here's what it might look like.



Sounds like a lot of work? Maybe. But the initial images won't take but 10 minutes to make. And by doing incremental images, you can always go back one step, rather than having to re-do the entire setup. No need to worry about the serial number stuff, just restore the entire image. Notice that the final size of the image with Windows 7 installed, all the updates, and all the software installed, is only 6GB (compressed), and only takes up 15GB on the hard disk.

Of course none of this is necessary if you are sure that you can do all of this and not make any mistakes along the way.

That's how I did mine. Hope this helps.

 

You are very welcome, and may I suggest while you are in the reading mood, you go over to the Windows Loader Forum and spend some time reading that thread. It's stickied at the top of the forum, Windows Loader, Support and Chat. It's 1700 pages long, and while some say it's too long to read, I figured if Daz, Urie, Tito, and Capt Kirk can take the time to read and reply to the 1700 messages, I can read them. And I did. Every last one of them (ok, I did skip a few ) .

It took a couple of days, and when I was done, I was able to complete the entire process without any problems.

Good luck.