How to Upgrade Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 Final

How to Upgrade Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 Final

Windows 7 Build 7600 Final (Windows 7 RTM) by default will not allow you to do an upgrade install. If you try to upgrade to Windows 7 Final, you get the following message: “You can’t upgrade this prerelease version of Windows 7″. Don’t worry, all hope is not lost. There is a small fix that will allow you to upgrade to Windows 7 Final. This how to will describe the process needed to upgrade from Windows 7 Build 7100 (windows 7 RC) to Windows 7 Build 7600 without doing a clean install.

1. Insert the Windows 7 Final DVD into your DVD drive.
2. Copy the contents of the Windows 7 Final DVD to a folder on your hard disk. Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
3. Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
4. Open the folder named “sources.” Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
5. Open the file named “cversion.ini.” in Notepad. It has the following lines:
“[HostBuild]
MinClient=7223.0
MinServer=7100.0″
4. Change the MinClient line so it reads as follows:
MinClient=7000.0
5. Save the file “cversion.ini” in place with the same name.
6. Launch the “setup.exe” file from the Windows 7 Final folder to upgrade your Windows 7 Beta to the final version.