Windows 7 RC & Upgrade

[apmallett]

Just installed Windows 7 upgrade and at no point did it ask for a previous licence key. I was all ready to enter my Vista key and it activated without it. The only thing I can think of is that the hard drive had a copy of Windows 7 RC on it which I booted up before installing retail, but formated over it for a fresh start.

Anyone else encounter it?

[Norman121]

In my experience, the Windows 7 upgrade doesn't need you to input the key from your previous OS installation at any point. It simply requires you to have had a qualifying operating system (eg. Vista) installed on the hard drive previously.

I assume you formatted from within the Windows installation? If so, the upgrade would have already verified the fact that you had a previous Windows OS and allowed you to continue.

If you wipe the drive with another program, leaving it empty when the upgrade installation loads up, it won't let you continue. The only solution in that case is to reload the previous operating system and then try the upgrade again.

So if you had Vista/7 on the drive before, that's good enough for the upgrade disk.