Upgrading to 32bit Win7- could not boot to next phase

So i'm trying to upgrade from vista 32 bit to 7 32bit using an official CD. Doing a clean install isnt something I want to do b/c I dont want to lose everything on my harddrive.

When I do the upgrade I get the error "Windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation." I've tried disabling everything but microsoft services at bootup before installing, but to no avail. The compatibility checker thing doesn't come up with any problems before installation. I've got over 20gigs of space still on my harddrive, so I don't think that's the problem. I've also run the chkdsk utility from the command prompt, but I don't think it found anything. The windows compatibility checker first found issue with SCSI/RAID controllers, but an uninstallation of daemon tools took care of that and it doesnt come up with any other compatibility errors

Any ideas to help?

 

Yeah, tried all of those things and they didnt work. No partitions on the hard drive (poor practice I know). What I want to preserve are the programs installed If I created a separate partition for Windows 7, could I just go back into the original partition and run the programs from there? I'm not too keen on all the details of the partitioning, but since you said I could have a separate partition for programs and data, would it be possible to do something like set up a dualboot of vista and 7 and just run programs on the vista partition with 7?

Let me know if that doesnt make sense, as that very well may likely be the case