How to Upgrade Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 Release Canditate

Microsoft's Windows 7 Engineering Team has important information for Windows 7 Beta Users Upgrading to the (upcoming) Release Canditate.

Bottom Line:

• Upgrading from Windows Vista --> Windows 7 RC -- No problem!
• Upgrading from Windows 7 Beta to Windows 7 RC -- Mulitple Answers. . .
  

Answer #1 - No. Clean Intsalls or Vista Upgrades Only: "We want to encourage you to revert to a Vista image and upgrade or to do a clean install, rather than upgrade the existing Beta. We know that means reinstalling, recustomizing, reconfiguring, and so on. That is a real pain. The reality is that upgrading from one pre-release build to another is not a scenario we want to focus on because it is not something real-world customers will experience."

Answer #2 - Yes; but don't do it: "We are going to provide a mechanism for you to use if you absolutely require this upgrade."

Here’s what you can do to bypass the check for pre-release upgrade IF YOU REALLY REALLY NEED TO:

1. Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
   
2. 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).
   
3. Browse to the sources directory.
   
4. Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
   
5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000.
   
6. Save the file in place with the same name.
   
7. Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.