Originally posted by: pyro451
Great information here but I still don't have a clear answer to my situation (maybe I'm just not reading closely enough).
I have a fully licensed Windows XP Home installed on my computer (has been built from scratch and upgraded too many times to remember). I decided to buy the digital river upgrade to Win7Pro x64 and started the download before leaving home this morning.
I plan to completely sacrifice my old rig and part it out so I can install Win7 on the new i7 box I built. The new box has two brand new WD RE3s in RAID1 and NO FLOPPY DRIVE.
So, can I boot from the win 7 DVD (from digital river - "Upgrade") and install to my new rig?
If I have to install XP on the new rig first, I do not have a floppy drive to load the RAID drivers.
How screwed am I?
Thanks!
IF, and that's a big IF, that something that I read is true, that when you perform the upgrade for the first time, MS stores your XP key from your previous install, along with the info that you upgraded, so that if you ever need to do a clean install, you can do a fresh clean install from the Upgrade DVD, and then input your product key, and then when you activate it, MS then sees that you already performed the upgrade legitimately, and then activates your Upgrade copy, without you having to re-install XP first again.
If this is true, then concievably, you could upgrade your old rig to Win7, and activate Win7. Then you could format the old rig, and do a clean install on the new rig, with Win7, and activate it, and it would know that you already upgraded. Since the Win7 retail upgrade can be transferred between machines, this would also be within the EULA.
Whereas, if you attempted to move your OEM XP from your old PC to your new PC, and then do the upgrade to Win7 then, you would be violating your XP EULA.