Windows 7 forum: Upgrade to Windows 7 from Vista

Can I install Win 7 on a new hdd set as master with the hdd containing Vista on the "slave".

I think the computer has a couple of problems:

One it has Vista.
Two it has had a lot of install/uninstall and maybe some re-install of various programs over its 7 year life. Probably has lots of crumbs and hairballs in the registry.

I have the new hard drive for the machine now and could clone the old HDD to the new one and then do the upgrade path, but that would leave all those crumbs and hairballs in the new HDD and OS. What I would like to do is a clean install of Win 7 on the new HDD without going through the aggravation of installing Vista on the new HDD and doing all of the updates. I had the apparently crazy idea that I could reinstall Vista off the original media and then just do the upgrade. Windows 7 upgrade disks should have all of the Vista updates up to its release date and not need any Vista updates. Is that an incorrect assumption?

Further complicating my thoughts on this is that the existing HDD has a partition for the operating system and another for Data. I will be looking at it in the next few days. I can't afford to get this machine to a point that it can't be used.

EJ

...about your configuration. Since your computer is 7 years old, I don't know whether we're talking about IDE (PATA) or SATA. If SATA, you don't have master/slave configurations. Is the new drive IDE or SATA? The IDE drives are getting scarce these days, so I'm inclined to suspect the new drive is SATA. Does your mobo support SATA? In any event if you install the new hard drive, you should be able to create a new partition on it, format it, and give it a drive letter, then install the Windows 7 upgrade to it, giving you a clean install. You shouldn't have to do anything else as long as the Windows 7 upgrade can see Vista installed on the old drive. Once you do that, you can create 1 or more partitions on the new drive and copy your data to one of them.

Good luck.