How To Upgrade To Windows 7 From Windows XPHow To Upgrade To Windows 7 From Windows XP

With Windows 7 now available for pre-order (and selling like hotcakes), it's fast poised to become the next big emblematic version of Windows -- what for a long time XP was to Windows as a whole. But people currently running XP who want 7 need to be mindful of a potential complication: While Windows supported direct upgrades from XP to Vista, they're not supporting a direct upgrade path from XP to 7.

What's this mean for potential upgraders? It means you can't take a current Windows XP computer, throw in the Windows 7 installation DVD, and upgrade your running XP installation to 7 with programs and data intact.

This whole situation and the processes that go with it have set more than a few heads spinning, mine included. It seems unfair to deny XP users -- the biggest market segment of Windows users -- the power to upgrade directly to 7. But as we'll see in this article, the obstacles are more a question of which steps to take and in what order.

What You Can't Do, And Why

Because this whole issue inspires such confusion, the details are worth repeating in the plainest possible language. You cannot:

1. Take an existing Windows XP installation,

2. Run the Windows 7 installer, and

3. Upgrade that running copy of XP to 7 with its installed programs and data intact.

What You Can Do

What you can do is one of these three things:

1. Install a copy of Windows 7 on the same computer, in parallel with your existing XP install,

2. Install a copy of Windows 7 on the same computer and Replace your existing XP install entirely, or

3. Obtain an entirely new computer with 7 installed, and Migrate your existing XP data and application settings to it.

The first and third options are non-destructive: they leave your existing XP installation intact in one form or another and allow you to copy what's most important over to the target install. The second option is the least useful, and so will be covered only peripherally here.

The big question everyone asks is: Why did Microsoft make an XP-to-7 upgrade impossible? There's two major reasons for this -- one relatively new, and the other all-too-familiar to people who've tried to perform an upgrade install and augured headfirst into a wall.

1. Upgrade installs are notoriously flaky by nature. Many people report problems with upgrade installs that never show up in clean installs, if only because there are that many less variables to account for in the latter. I've had plenty of these issues on my own, to the point where my own personal rule is to never do this, since it creates at least as many problems as it allegedly solves.

2. The sheer number of under-the-hood differences between XP and 7 makes an in-place upgrade infeasible. The general rule of thumb with such things is that you can only upgrade one generation at a time: XP to Vista, Vista to 7, but not XP to 7.

Keep in mind, this has nothing to do with whether or not you can buy the upgrade edition media of Windows 7 and use that to upgrade an existing XP PC. You can do that just fine -- you just won't be able to use your existing XP installation. You'll have to migrate or back up your data, and then install 7 in parallel or wipe everything clean.

There's a few other caveats worth pointing out, too. Not everyone may run into them, but they've surfaced through my own experiences, and may be relevant here:

1. You cannot upgrade any 32-bit version of Windows directly to a 64-bit version. You have to do a clean install. Parallel installs are okay, though.

2. You can't perform an in-place upgrade of any kind by booting from the DVD, even if you have a valid OS for an in-place upgrade. You have to boot the operating system you want to upgrade, then insert the DVD and run the upgrade.

3. You can't upgrade from a pre-release version of 7 to the final version of 7. There, you'll also need to do a clean install.

4. And no, upgrading from XP to Vista and then Vista to 7 is not advisable either -- aside from being a complete waste of a Vista license, it's bound to introduce so much flakiness as to make it not worth the trouble.

Now that you have some idea of the dimensions of the problem, it's time for some solutions. Parallel Install: On A Different Partition Or Drive

The most basic way to get 7 running on the same machine as XP is to install 7 in parallel -- i.e., a dual-boot arrangement. This allows you to switch as needed between both operating systems -- you have a clean install of 7 which you can migrate data into and install applications on, and you have your old XP install which you can continue to run for the sake of whatever backwards compatibility might be needed.

The catch for this is simple: you can't install running copies of XP and 7 on the same disk partition. They have to be on different partitions, or on completely different physical drives altogether.

There's a couple of ways to approach this. If you've been meaning to drop the money for a new hard drive at some point, this is as good an excuse as any to do it: you can install the new drive as a primary drive (the first one polled for booting), place 7 there, and boot back to the secondary (XP) drive as needed. Most late-model computers let you choose which device to boot from without having to fiddle with things in BIOS; my own desktop PC and notebook let you do this by tapping F12 during startup. Once the migration was complete I set the second drive to be to the default boot drive, and that was that.

Another option is to simply repartition your existing drive, although this can be intimidating for a less technical user -- and the long-term consequences of this arrangement can be a little tricky. If you resize your existing XP partition and install a Windows 7 partition in the empty space, it'll work -- up until the point you decide to remove the XP partition entirely. Since the entire system's boot information was contained in the XP partition, guess what? You've now got an unbootable system.

To fix that, you'll need to resize the Windows 7 partition to fill the empty space (best to do this part now), and use the Windows 7 install media to repair the boot information. The Windows 7 boot-repair system is semi-automatic: If you boot the install media and select "Repair your computer," the system will be scanned to determine what's broken. The "Startup Repair" option in "System Recovery Options" runs more repair functions automatically, and at the end generates a log of all changes made.

Incidentally, the software used to resize the partition can be one of a number of things. I've long been a fan of Terabyte Unlimited's BootIt Next Generation, which can perform non-destructive resizing of NTFS partitions and do all kinds of other manipulations that normally aren't possible. Parallel Install: On The Same Partition Or Drive

Maybe "parallel install" isn't the right moniker for this method, because it doesn't give you two bootable OSes. If you boot from the Windows 7 install media and elect to place 7 on the same partition as Windows XP without formatting it, the old Windows XP installation (including the user folders) will be moved to a subfolder named Windows.old. You won't be able to boot the old Windows installation, but all of your existing user data will be preserved and can be copied out by hand.

This method's a mixed bag. On the one hand, it means you can do a clean install on a partition that you can't afford to reformat -- for instance, if you have difficulty backing up and restoring user data because you don't have blank media or additional hard disk space. On the other hand, it means that any user-state data that can't be migrated easily by hand -- Microsoft Office settings, for instance -- will be lost. For those things you'll either need to perform a Windows Easy Transfer backup ahead of time (described later in this article), or simply recreate the settings by hand.

Nuke And Pave

The title should tell it all: With this option, you don't make any attempt to preserve the state of the existing Windows XP installation. You boot the install media, format the target partition completely (hint: use Quick Format, you'll spend far less time drumming your fingers), and simply install Windows 7 clean.

The only time you'd probably want to do something like this is if you've inherited someone else's XP machine, you're putting a clean install of 7 on it, and want to make sure no stale user data is left over in any form.

Another possible reason to do this is if you don't use any software that keeps settings in the user's profile folder -- for instance, the programs in the PortableApps collection. This is rare, but I know a few people who follow such a system pretty scrupulously and don't keep anything of value in their Users folder. Windows Easy Transfer

Now comes the answer to the toughest question: What if I want to reinstall, but keep all my user settings? Or at least as many of them as humanly possible?

This is where a Microsoft utility called Windows Easy Transfer, or Migration Wizard, comes into the picture. It's been used to transport Windows XP user information over to Windows Vista systems, and now it can be used to move XP user data to Windows 7 systems as well. The program scans your existing XP installation and copies the data to be moved into a single file. This file can be stored on a drive somewhere and then run on the target machine to restore the user data in question. It's not obvious where it is, though: It's on the Windows 7 setup CD in the directory \support\migwiz\migsetup.exe.

As with some of Microsoft's other programs, it's been designed to be easy to use -- maybe a little too easy. For one, the advanced options for the program -- the ability to select or deselect specific directories -- is a little buried. After the program finishes detecting what can be copied and presents you with a short list of what to copy, select "Customize" and then "Advanced" to see a full directory tree. You'll want to do this to make doubly sure you're backing up everything you want, but you'll also want to avoid copying files that are not actually in your Users folder but are hosted elsewhere.

A perfect example of this: the My Music folder. On my old system, the My Music folder was actually a folder on another hard drive, with some 160 GB of music on it (all ripped from my CD collection). By default, Easy Transfer was set to copy all of this stuff into my user-data backup file. Thankfully, I aborted the operation before it tried to fill up my backup drive with a completely redundant copy of my music library.

Note that you can save the Easy Transfer backup file to the partition where you're going to install Windows 7, as long as you don't format the partition. You'll be best off saving the file to a removable drive, a network location, or a second hard drive on the same system, just for the sake of complete safety.

One final piece of advice: When you create your new Windows 7 installation, create two user accounts. One will be the user you're migrating from your previous installation -- i.e., where you'll be restoring all the user settings -- and the other will be a user account for the sake of temporary administration until everything's been migrated over. That way you can perform any work on the system without using the very account you're going to be migrating in -- or over.

What About Product Activation?

Because no copy of Windows works without product activation, people upgrading from XP to 7 have good reason to wonder how 7 will handle an upgrade activation. The short version is simple: A running copy of XP must be on the target machine before you can apply an upgrade version of 7. The existing XP installation will be segregated into a Windows.old folder, but XP has to be actually installed and running on the system first.

To that end, don't preemptively erase an existing XP install if you're planning on upgrading to 7. Just providing a copy of XP's install media -- the CD -- won't do the trick. (I suspect some of this is because many XP "install" CDs were in fact system-image CDs that the Windows installer cannot make head or tail of, and so can't be used to verify an installation.)

For Further Reading

Microsoft Windows 7 Under The Hood;

Windows 7 Deep Dive;

Windows XP's Final Days: A Practical Guide.

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