Installing Windows 7 over Windows Vista??????

[QuickDrawOrigin]

Ok, new here and still learning the ropes as to how to get things accomplished around the forum here, so if I'm creating a topic here that already exists, sorry about that.

I just purchased VMWare Fusion and installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64b and I have a Windows 7 Upgrade Disc and I'm wanting to install W7 over the top of Vista in my virtual machine. I realize that you cannot use an upgrade disc and go from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Premium, but I can legally install a NEW installation of Windows 7. Every time I try though, Windows setup tells me that there has to be a certain amount of disk space to do it. I have expanded my virtual disk...etc...etc., everything I can think of in order to accomplish this, but I can't seem to get it done. I would greatly appreciate some help here.

I switched to VMWare to try out for a while and see if it is better/simpler/easier/whatever than the competition and I gotta tell ya, I had absolutely no problems doing this same thing with the competitive product and am already regretting switching. PLEASE HELP. Thank you for your time.

[continuum]

Every time I try though, Windows setup tells me that there has to be a certain amount of disk space to do it.

Do you really create a brand new empty VM when you try this ?

This really should be easy - I guess you try to do something strange.

Please explain how you proceed in details




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[QuickDrawOrigin]

Thank you for your reply. What I do, and I'm assuming it has to be done like this....if it doesn't please let me know, is within the virtual machine I put in the Upgrade disc, run the setup.exe file, it loads up and/or copies over some setup files, and it eventually gets to the point to where I can either UPGRADE or Install a new copy of Windows 7 onto the virtual disk. Obviously I cannot Upgrade because the virtual machine is a Vista Ultimate and I'm wanting to install Window 7 Home Premium, which is legal by the way. So I choose, Install New Copy (or whatever the heck it is called..there are only 2 options) and the setup program does a few things (looks at all the disks I guess) and then proceeds to tell me that Windows 7 cannot be installed on the disk (whatever VMWare Fusion is calling the virtual machines disk) and there is a link that you can click to find out why it cannot be installed, I click that, and it says that the disk MUST have a certain amount of free space on it to accomplish the installation ... and that is that.

Thanks for any more help you can provide...as I mentioned in my original post, I have already expanded the virtual disk and everything else I can think of to get this accomplished, but no joy.

[Entegy · Accepted solution]

The reason Windows is complaining about not enough space is because it will move the old Vista installation into a folder called WIndows.old so you can retrieve files later. So the virtual hard drive has to have the space for both the Windows 7 installation and the old Vista installation.

You've expanded the virtual disk, but probably forgot to expand the partition in Windows. This is not done automatically.

In Vista, open the Start Menu and type "Computer Management" in the search. Choose the option that comes up.

Once in Computer Management, choose "Disk Management" from the left sidebar.

Now, on the lower part of the screen, you'll see a visual representation of your hard drive's partitions. I bet that after the C:\ drive, there's gonna be a large grey space. This is the extra space given when you expanded the hard drive, but did not assign to Windows. To use this space, right-click the C:\ drive's block and choose "Expand Volume". You can accept all the defaults as you move through the Expand Volume Wizard and you will be able to use that extra space you gave the vm.

[QuickDrawOrigin]

Excellent, that did it, thanks. Now however I have another problem that perhaps you can help me with. There doesn't seem to be a way, that I can see anyway, to "Compress" the virtual disk?? Do you know of any way? Also in the configure area of the virtual disk there is only one type of drive showing up that I can pick for disks. Is this normal? I'm comparing the VMWare virtual machine to another virtual machine from a competitor and theirs seems much better in that you can pick from many different sorts of disk types, as an example, the other virtual machine of the competitor program is a SATA type disk and it seems to run much quicker/better and it shrinks and expands as needed saving crucial memory. Do you know if this is possible with VMWare virtual machines as well? When the VMWare virtual machine is up and running I only have like 375 MB memory left, whereas when the competitor virtual machine is up and running I have, most of the time, over 1G of memory left over for whatever I need it for. Big difference there in my book. Is there settings in the VMWare program that I'm possibly missing that could account for these big differences? Thanks for your time.