TR Forums

I figured I'd see if anyone else has been in this position before... I've got a netbook that I just slapped a little 64gb SSD into. It came with Windows 7 Starter, and was upgraded by the person to Home Premium. After the hard drive crapped out, we want to install it again with Home Premium but the copy of Home is an upgrade only (Yay.....). Just hoping someone had a shortcut to installing this combo without having to install Starter (MS Technet?) and then install yet again another upgrade on the system? Any shortcuts would be very appreciated.

I considered cloning a Netbook with Starter with Acronis, slapping that image onto this netbook and then doing the upgrade, but that seems silly. You'd think Microsoft would allow you to install an upgrade copy fresh and just require that you include the Starter key along with the upgrade key to activate or something, but that would make to much sense.

Same way as with Vista 'upgrade' - http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/31 ... rsion.html

I've used method 4 successfully with both Vista and Win 7 upgrade licenses. Option 1 sounds like the most straightforward of course, it sounds like just a regular install to me. If you want more detailed instructions do some searching, I know there are more detailed step-by-step articles out there.

And the reason this is allowed by MS and is legal according to the license agreement is for the exact situation you described - hardware failure.