Is it possible to *upgrade* an existing Vista VM to Windows 7 Professional, or do I have to create a new VM them migrate my Vista applications and files to the new VM? Thanks!
I just upgraded my Vista Business VM to Windows 7 Professional. Make sure that you have Vista SP1 installed. After that you should be ready to go. While the upgrade took a long time it did complete successfully. The only other issue that I ran into was that I needed to uninstall the Parallels Tools and reinstall them so that my Parallels Shared Folders would work in Windows 7. Good luck!
I had a Boot Camp partition which was running Vista Business 32 bit. I upgraded to Win 7 Professional 32 bit and after a struggle I managed to get the Snow Leopard Boot Camp 3.0 to install (had to delete a registry key or Boot Camp drivers kept insisting a reboot was required and failed to install). At this point I tried running the Boot Camp partition in Parallels 4 to be greeted by a Stop 0x7b blue screen. To get this working I found MergeIDE.reg (Google for it ) and after installing this in Boot Camp I managed to get a Parallels Win 7 boot and re-installed the Parallels Tools. So yes it is possible to upgrade a Vista Business install to Win 7 Professional, but just don't expect it to be easy and keep Google fired up
Thanks guys. How did you initiate the *upgrade* process? I was using Vista Home Premium and could not find any way to initiate an upgrade of my Vista (Home Premium) VM, so I tried creating a new Windows 7 VM (using Windows 7 Business Professional, Upgrade). The VM was created just fine; however, attempting to get Windows 7 onto it was impossible -- the software would install, but Windows kept reporting that the Product Key was invalid. I returned the Windows 7 Business Professional, Upgrade and purchased Windows 7 Business Professional, Full version which installed and verified without a problem. Now my challenge is getting the apps and data from the old Vista VM onto the new Windows 7 VM. Can I use Parallels Transporter to do this?
I just inserted the Windows 7 DVD and chose the upgrade option on my Boot Camp partition. I think Transporter creates a new VM, so I doubt it. Even the Win7 migration tools are designed to work on the same machine...