Windows 7 Upgrade unsuccessful

[Pun]

So my brother did the whole student discount thing from Digital River and got Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit. He's trying to upgrade from Vista Home Premium 32-bit. He got all the way to the last step (transferring files/programs/etc) and then his laptop rebooted and had a message saying the upgrade was unsuccessful and was going to rollback to his old files.

Now it's just in a loop of rebooting trying to restore the files. He doesn't get an option to start in Vista, only Windows 7, Start Windows Setup Rollback, or the memory diagnostic tool.

Anyone else experiencing this or know what to do? I see a couple other people having this problem on the Microsoft Windows 7 Installation/Upgrade forum.

I'm afraid to do the upgrade myself now, as I would be upgrading to and from the same OSes as him, only on a desktop rather than a laptop.

[kuronosan]

Uh, don't upgrade?

[fishstix]

Yeah... in an upgrade process, once you get past a certain point, the previous OS is gone and should be unrecoverable.

[Cephius]

I did the upgrade last night without problems. Of course, I backed up my stuff just incase, as any sensible person should do if attempting this.

It's also important to run the Windows 7 compatibility check - it'll tell you what programs to remove before attempting the upgrade.

[Pun]

I did the upgrade last night without problems. Of course, I backed up my stuff just incase, as any sensible person should do if attempting this.

It's also important to run the Windows 7 compatibility check - it'll tell you what programs to remove before attempting the upgrade.

He did run the tool and got no warnings concerning anything

[melbufrauma]

I had the same thing, it would say something about the boot drive and to insert disk but i downloaded it from the site and got no disc... then i would turn comp off and back on and it would say upgrade failed and it was restoring my previous version of windows

[Senoska]

Don't upgrade, do a fresh install on a partition the installer made.

[bungiefan]

I've had that happen twice at work. Office Depot is now having technology department workers actually do Windows 7 installs and upgrades, and I keep telling customers that upgrade in-place is unreliable and messy, but they still keep telling me to do it, and it has yet to work for me once. It's funny, because when they had us start working on computers (software-only) in-store, they said we'd NEVER be doing OS installs because they're too risky when it comes to possible loss of data, and here we are starting with the OS release this week being expected to do it, and they are offering it for free if people bring us the install disc and the computer they want it installed on.

[Pun]

Well, just an update to this problem. My brother received a call from Microsoft providing him with an email address to request a patch from Digital River:

[email protected]

and to burn the patch file and the expandedSetup folder left by the upgrade installer to a disc and boot up with it. He said to expect the email with the patch in it in about 8 hours after sending.