Important precautions to take before upgrading to Windows 10

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

actually I DID read it -- my way is that you boot from the EXTERNAL macrium device -- so you image your computer just as it was before installing anything.

cheers
jimbo

Ok, I see what you are getting at. And a very handy bootable USB flash drive to have is a combined Kyhi recovery drive/Windows 10 installation drive. Take the boot.wim file from the sources folder of Kyhi's recovery drive and overwrite the boot.wim file in the sources folder of a Windows 10 installation drive. (You can rename the Windows boot.wim to boot.bak first if you want to keep it).

Then you can image the factory fresh hard drive and go right into Windows setup from file explorer on Kyhi's drive and don't have to swap USB flash drives and reboot. I would have done that, but I also wanted to upgrade the stick computer to Pro, so what I did was boot into the factory Windows 8.1. Did not enter the password for my WiFi so there was no internet connection. Created a local account on it. Went into settings and turned Windows updates off. Then connected to the WiFi to activate it, installed Macrium Reflect from my NAS, imaged the hard drive, exported the device drivers, then upgraded to Windows 8.1 Pro. Finally grabbed the genuineticket.xml from Windows 8.1 Pro and did a clean install.

Windows 10 picked up the Windows 8.1 with Bing product key in bios and installed Windows 10 Home. That activated, I got all the drivers installed and settled in, then upgraded to Windows 10 Pro and used the genuineticket.xml file to activate it. So now the stick computer has digital entitlements to both Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro.

Things to do before upgrading laptops. Plug in AC adapter. Clean up temporary files and run a virus scan. Remove programs you will no longer need to free up space. Follow the installer wizard and all should go well.

Hi All,
I've been trying 'upgrade' my older Acer laptop that's running a 'activated/genuine' copy of windows 7 sp1 32-bit, to windows 10 home edition. I tried several times now..and so far haven't succeeded , I'm really frustrated at this point that it won't install properly. The process starts ok, but then all of a sudden I get the now famous screen prompt that states " something went wrong " and the process stops without any explanation at all. I've tried EVERYTHING I can think of to try and get this done..ran disk cleanup, disabled/un-installed my third party anti-virus software, went into device manager and made sure I didn't have any yellow '!' marks..etc. etc. . I really don't now what else to do, last night I downloaded the latest available windows 10 ISO image and burnt the image to a dvd. If anyone has any suggestion's I'd be glad to try them.
Thanks,
David

Davy49 said:

If anyone has any suggestion's I'd be glad to try them.
Thanks,
David

If you have an external hard drive, make an image of your current hard drive using Macrium Reflect Free. Look for a Windows 7 COA sticker for a product key, if no COA sticker, run showkey plus from this forum and write down Windows 7 product key. If showkey says it is an OEM:SLP product key, it won't work for Windows 10 activation. Run the gatherosstate.exe file (after you copy it to your desktop from the Windows 10 DVD), and save the resulting genuineticket.xml file to a USB flash drive or other external location where you will have access to it.

Now, either create an empty space on the hard drive for Windows 10 by shrinking the Windows 7 partition using MiniTool Partition Wizard (do not create a new partition) - or be prepared to wipe the entire hard drive. Boot from the Windows 10 DVD. Click "I don't have a product key" when asked. Select the matching Windows 10 version for the Windows 7 that you had. Click custom install. If you want to wipe the hard drive, delete every partition on the hard drive and install to the unallocated space. If you made an empty space for Windows 10, then select that unallocated space without deleting the existing partitions. Click next to install Windows 10 to the empty space.

If all goes well, you will end up with a clean Windows 10 and depending on how you did, it might be dual booting with Windows 7. Activate the Windows 10 by either changing the product key on the activation tab under settings, update and security to the Windows 7 product key or copy the genuineticket.xml file to the proper folder. If you are dual booting now, you will have to erase the Windows 7 immediately because you are violating the EULA to keep them both installed at the same time.

You will lose your Windows 7. If you don't have the computer's Windows 7 restore media made or the Macrium Reflect Free image, the only way to get it back will be to do a clean install of Windows 7 - which you will need the install DVD/flash drive to do. Just be warned of this before you erase the Windows 7 be either deleting it's partition or wiping the hard drive.

Macrium Reflect Free

Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free
Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First - Windows 10 Forums

Hi NavyLCDR,
Of course..THANKS SO much for your timely reply, what you state really makes sense. I'm surely not the type of person to give up on something..I have already downloaded/installed the Macrium Reflect Free software that you included in your reply. I'm typing the post on my windows 10 laptop..I copied the macrium installation file to a usb drive and plan on installing the software on the laptop I'm trying to get windows 10 to install on. I can't remember ever having so much trouble trying to install some software. Thanks SO Much !!
David :)

Interesting read.