What’s the best way to upgrade to Windows 7 from XP Pro or XP Home? You can’t, but you don’t have to format your drive either. If Windows 7 finds an operating system on the destination partition, it will ask you if you want to wipe it out or keep the old operating system.

Keep Your Stuff

What happens if you install Windows 7 over XP? Windows 7 will move your entire drive into a Windows.old directory it creates. When the new Windows 7 install is finished, when you boot it will ask you if you want to Boot into the new Windows 7 operating system or the old one. It doesn’t say XP it just says old. What happens if you boot into the old operating system? I don’t know. I did this on my wife’s machine and already messed it up once.

Rule #1

Always have a bootable CD (DVD) to restore your system. Make copies of your original install disks and keep the originals in a safe place and the copies in a safe place. My wife’s PC had a bad file and wouldn’t boot. I tried overwriting the file it said was bad with the same file from a different machine and it wouldn’t work. After hours of searching for some sort of ISO image for XP. A free ISO doesn’t exist on the net except as a torrent and how do you know which one to trust? You can’t even get a free trial from Microsoft anymore.

I finally gave up and installed a XP Home CD I had and got it to work. But then I figured I have a brand new Windows 7  the production release, (Schools received their copies early) and figured this was as good a time as any. Especially since my product key was for Pro and I had this Home disk I was going to have to do something else pretty soon anyway.

After installing 7 and restoring the data, I had to reinstall Office, but everything else I downloaded and found the keys in old email. Make sure you have enough space to keep both operating systems. The official space requirement for 7 is 16 gb a little more wouldn’t hurt so you have room to move folders around to your new user account on your data drive.

Personally I prefer a separate partition for my operating systems using Bootit NG (see side bar for link) as a boot manager, but if your going to only run one operating system on a drive and are a little concerned about wiping everything out, choosing installing over current operating system will work. Make sure you have backups somewhere else just in case.