Windows XP to Windows 7

DevGrousis · Mar 17, 2011

I have 2 different versions of Windows 7 ISO's on my windows xp side, and for some reason burning them to disks doesnt seem to do anything.

I've heard you can use a USB to boot from that

my problem so far is that i cant get my MBP to boot from CD, because i cant enter BIOS in order to tell it to do that.

can anyone give me any info?

Macbook Pro 13inch from 2009ish

balamw · Mar 17, 2011

DevGrousis said:
can anyone give me any info?

A couple of things:

Macs have no BIOS. To boot from optical disc you hold the Alt/Option or "C" buttons during boot.
USB boot of legacy OSes (Windows) is generally not well supported on the Mac.
How are you burning the ISO?

B

simsaladimbamba · Mar 17, 2011

Macs don't have a BIOS, they have EFI.

Anyway, to boot from a bootable Windows DVD, you just need to hold down OPTION/ALT right after the startup sound chimes. Then you should be able to boot from that DVD.
I don't know if you can just upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7 like that, maybe MRoogle can find you some threads about this.

balamw · Mar 17, 2011

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simsaladimbamba said:
Macs don't have a BIOS, they have EFI.

Anyway, to boot from a bootable Windows DVD, you just need to hold down OPTION/ALT right after the startup sound chimes. Then you should be able to boot from that DVD.
I don't know if you can just upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7 like that, maybe MRoogle can find you some threads about this.

XP to W7 is a custom install, which basically means backup, install, migrate.

IMHO the best approach for W7 over XP is to do a clean install with upgrade media as described at winsupersite.

B

simsaladimbamba · Mar 17, 2011

balamw said:
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XP to W7 is a custom install, which basically means backup, install, migrate.

IMHO the best approach for W7 over XP is to do a clean install with upgrade media as described at winsupersite.

B

Does that mean, the "backup" process needs an external HDD or extra partition to backup to?

balamw · Mar 17, 2011

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Yes. There is no in-place upgrade path for XP to 7. IIRC you can also burn your data to an optical disc.

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simsaladimbamba · Mar 17, 2011

balamw said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Yes. There is no in-place upgrade path for XP to 7. IIRC you can also burn your data to an optical disc.

B

Thanks. Windows 5.1 is ten years old anyway.

DevGrousis · Mar 17, 2011

i used Magic ISO to burn the iso files onto the disk.

when i hear the startup chime and hold down Option, all i get is to choose between Mac OS partition and my Windows partition, there is no option to run from CD.

Do you think it would be easier if i were to get ahold of Windows Vista, install that, then upgrade to 7?

balamw · Mar 17, 2011

DevGrousis said:
Do you think it would be easier if i were to get ahold of Windows Vista, install that, then upgrade to 7?

Shouldn't be.

Depending on the source of the ISO, it may not be bootable. So you have a couple of options.

Use the "official" ISO from Microsoft (http://techpp.com/2009/11/11/download-windows-7-iso-official-direct-download-links/) and just use your activation key.

If that doesn't work, you should make sure that the CD you burned boots in a regular PC and if so try different media. Superdrives can be picky.

B

Joshuarocks · Mar 18, 2011

Links..

balamw said:
Shouldn't be.

Depending on the source of the ISO, it may not be bootable. So you have a couple of options.

Use the "official" ISO from Microsoft (http://techpp.com/2009/11/11/download-windows-7-iso-official-direct-download-links/) and just use your activation key.

If that doesn't work, you should make sure that the CD you burned boots in a regular PC and if so try different media. Superdrives can be picky.

B

didn't work.

balamw · Mar 18, 2011

Joshuarocks said:
didn't work.

What didn't? There were a bunch of things in the previous message. What failed and how, specifically.

B

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Windows XP to Windows 7

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