I have a year old HP lap top with vista...I bought an HP tower with vista 4 months ago and they sent me a free win7 upgrade kit.. I want to use the upgrade for the lap top...the laptop is older than the june 2009 qualification date for a free upgrade. I followed the instructions and all went well until I put the prep disk in and it told me my laptop did not qualify...you have to use this disk before you install win7 disk.. is there a work around to fool the kit and let me install win 7.. I suspect the window 7 disk is not the full version because it made it real clear it would only work on up to date vista....if you had boot leg win 7 or XP they wanted you to put vista back in. I am not a geek and reading some of the post here are way over my head. thanks
What's the model of your laptop? I have a one year old HP6730b and on one of its BIOS upgrade, the SLIC was updated from v2.0 to 2.1 allowing me to upgrade to 7. I suspect that is the function of the prep-disk, to update the BIOS SLIC to allow the Windows 7 installer to activate.
So it is like a retail install. Maybe the thread starter is upgrading from an incompatible edition. There are the only possible in-place upgrades. Vista Home Premium -> 7 Home Premium Vista Business -> 7 Professional Vista Ultimate -> 7 Ultimate The upgrade only works when upgrading from 32-bit to 32-bit or from 64-bit to 64-bit of the same/equivalent edition.
It is home premium and the kit is the same...it is a problem with the lap top being older than the free up grade deal for PC bought after june 2009..There is something in the cpu telling HP how old mine is.. I didnt think it would be easy
HP upgrade disks are specific to the computer model they were created for. They query the BIOS for information to verify the upgrade disk is intended for the machine you are trying to install on. I have an upgrade disk for the same model of laptop I own (bought mine before upgrade available) and it will not install because setup looks at the motherboard model number and UUID string in the BIOS to determine if the upgrade is allowed. Fortunately HP added SLIC 2.1 into their BIOS upgrade for my laptop and using information gathered here I was able to create an OEM like install disk for 7 Ultimate. Then downloaded all the driver and software updates from HP. Now I have a 7 Ultimate running on my laptop without all the bloatware that the upgrade disk would install.