Vista Business to Vista Ultimate

tbird3

mealmond wrote: »

Hi

I ran the upgrade advisor as well and that says I need 15gb of free space, which I know is not correct.

Martin

Do you know its not correct? How? When it is installing, you will have the compressed files moved to your hard drive, they are uncompressed on the fly, with the files still on the hard drive, plus (as its a weighty process), it will be using some of the hard drive as a swap file, as your old one will be cleared. Just get another larger hard drive, if I only had 1gb left I'd be down Novatech ASAP! Run the files & settings transfer wizard, fit new hard drive, put new Windows on, then transfer back. EasyPeasyLemonSqueezy.:D

mealmond

Thanks for all the replies and responses so far.

Things have got a bit more complicated.

I decided last night to leave it until I had more time and would do a bit more reading.

I put the laptop on this morning and it would not boot and it said the bootmgr was compressed, I can honestly say I did not touch anything in the system yesterday evening, and it was working fine, last night.

I tried to do a repair from the install disc but it did not find any errors.

Now this is where I will hold my hands up to a !!!! up.

In error, I pressed the wrong button, after several attempts to repair the system, I started to install vista as a clean install. Once it started, I thought it was repairing and it was not until a while later I realised what I had done and thought it would be to late to stop it.

Now I Vista Ultimate but non of my old settings or programs running on D drive, the old Business Vista, which would not boot, appears to still be on my C drive, C drive is now also more or less full.

The other thing is as well, that I can see all the program files etc on C drive but they do not show on Vista Ultimate.

On the log on screen I now also have three options, Vista Old, Vista Business and Vista Ultimate.

I presume I will have to delte a lot of files off C drive but do not want to delete files that are important.

It may be better to just start again and wipe the drives but the Ultimate disc is an upgrade and I presume it would not work as a new install.

I would consider bigger hard drives but it is a laptop I am using.


Martin

spiro

On the Acer website it has a whole section on upgrading to Vista. Because I was installing 64bit Vista I had to do a clean install (wipes everthing) so I opted to buy a new hard disk which took about 5 minutes to fit. The space you can't see on your laptop is the Acer recovery area. You can get the tools off their website. Microsoft also have a program called Easy Transfer (i think) we backs everything up onto cd/dvd/external drive which you can then load using Vista. For an upgrade install I think you only need the media for the old OS so just borrow someones XP disk.

aliEnRIK

Out of sheer intrigue. Why do you want Vista ultimate? From the fact your C drive is way past 'full' (It should really have a LOT more room than that to work properly), im assuming the computer is fairly 'low spec'? It will probably run even slower using ultimate. What is it about ultimate that your after?

mealmond

I got the ultimate upgrade CD as a present so I decided I may as well install it, I thought it would be straight forward.

I saw the details for the windows transfer, I will look into if I can get all the settings etc from C drive and transfer them and put them on D drive and then wipe C drive and start a fresh.

Is there an easy way to see everything on a drive, including hidden files or unused areas?

Martin

mealmond

I have just re checked my laptop and I now have Vista Business and Vista Ultimate, both are operating fine, but I don't want both, I also realise I need to remove one of them to get the drives back to normal.

At the moment I am running the Windows Easy Transfer from Business and transfering it on to my portable hard drive.

Once finished I will transfer the files into Ultimate.

Once this is done, and I have checked all is ok with Ultimate, would I then be able to wipe the C drive and start again with a clean drive?


Martin

aliEnRIK

mealmond wrote: »

Once this is done, and I have checked all is ok with Ultimate, would I then be able to wipe the C drive and start again with a clean drive?


Martin

yes. Just format it from Ultimate
HOWEVER. id recommend (if you havnt already) doing a FULL FORMAT of the drive you want ultimate on and resinstalling as ive personally had loads of problems with doing QUICK formats (And having to run full formats again anyways)
Just trying to save you time and effort from experience.

mealmond

Thanks for the reply.

I was wondering if to start all over again but with it being an upgrade disc, I did not know where I stood.

Windows Business was and is on C drive, somehow, Ultimate has gone on to C drive.

At the moment Easy Transfer is just getting the settings and files from C.

So, I presume, once that has finished, I do the same for D drive, format D drive, install Ultimate on to D drive and recover files and setting from my two backups with Easy Transfer, and then I suppose I can format the C drive and have a clean start.

Conor_3

Go onto the C drive. Look for a folder called Windows old. In that, you'll find the entire contents of Program Files and the User account folders as well as additional entries in the Windows folders over the standard installation.

Conor_3

mealmond wrote: »

Thanks for the reply.

I was wondering if to start all over again but with it being an upgrade disc, I did not know where I stood.

There is no such thing as an upgrade disc. It is the same Vista disc as they all are with a different label on. All versions of Vista are now on one DVD and what version gets installed is determined by what licence key you enter so it doesn't matter what Vista DVD you have at all. You can choose to proceed without entering a CD key and it'll give you a list of versions to install.

If you enter your Business CD key, it'll install Business.