Windows 7 64 bit installation issues home upgrade (Student edition)

Hi everyone,

This week I have some issues installing Windows 7 64 bit edition on Parallels 5. I wanted to share my experience as I guess many people have faced the same issue recently as more and more Mac OS X users are running Windows on Mac.

The first issue I faced was that I bought the download version of the student edition (Home Premium). It cost in Canada only 40 dollars through Digital River. Here's the

website:http://windows7.digitalriver.com/store/mswpca/en_CA/DisplayHomePage?resid=3xaL0AoHAi8AAEGNUosAAAAU&rests=1257794572589

After you download the product, you'll end up with three files:

Win7-HP-Retail-en-us-x64.exe

setup1.box

setup2.box

If you run the installer it will try to uncompress the files and almost at the end of the process the installer will show you a message saying something about being able to continue because of folder permissions. Don't get discourage about it. This happening because the product that you're trying to install is in 64 bit version and you're probably installing it on 32 bit version of Windows X

P. At this point follow these steps:

1) Go to this website that explains how to burn a bootable DVD with the files that you downloaded and were uncompressed from the Internet.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/10/23/how-to-create-and-make-bootable-windows-7-iso-from-exe-plus-setup1-box-and-setup2-box-files/

2) Start your virtual Machine or PC and let it restart with this DVD.

3) Activate the product with Microsoft (here comes the next issue that I had activating the product).

The second issue happened when I needed to activate the product. I can't remember exactly the message that I got. However, it said something liked "The edition that you're trying to activate needs to be installed on 32 bit version". I almost got discouraged of this one too. However, I called Microsoft and they helped me to get it fixed.

Here are the instructions they gave me:

1) Open the registry and change registry key to 0. The change consists on changing MediaBootInstall registry key to 0 from 1.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE

3) Once you have applied these changes go to command line (cmd) and go to folder Windows\System32 and run command "cscript.exe slmgr.vbs -rearm" like this:

c:\Windows\System32>cscript.exe slmgr.vbs -rearm

4) Restart windows and try to activate again.

5) Post a message on this blog let everybody know if these instructions worked ;-).

I hope this blog has helped you save some time from this painful process.

Cheers,

Diego