Installing Win 7 on New SSD

[winxpuser]

Some background:

I have an HP laptop (dv6-1035cl) that came with Windows Vista pre-installed, without any OS disks, but with a software key printed on windows sticker on bottom of laptop. I upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium using a purchased upgrade (package is labelled 'Upgrade designed for Windows Vista - I have upgarde disk and upgrade product key).

I would like to replace the hard-drive with a SSD with Windows 7 Home Prioum as the OS.

What is the process for doing this since:

1) I only have Windows 7 upgrade
2) I do not have Vista disks to install first and then upgarde to Win 7

Would like to understand how to accomplish this install beforeI purchase the SSD.

My understanding is that the upgrade requires and OS )in this case Vista) to be installed befroe the upgrade can be installed.

Thanks in advance for help

 

[bazz2004]

It's certainly a pain when you have followed some of the upgrade paths. My first computer had W98 and I bought the upgrade disk for XP. When I scrapped the computer and tried to install it as a virtual OS the XP installation referred back to W98 and I needed to input the original disk and the licence number. If you want to do a clean install of W7 on an SSD I expect that you will have to do much the same procedure.

It would be easier to get your existing OS in good order then use either cloning software or a hard disk copy station to copy everything over. The SSD will likely have cloning software included. That would give you a bootable SSD running Windows 7. In fact I'd go further and as soon as you have this up and running take advantage of the free Windows 10 upgrade by using Windows media creation tool which can be downloaded from Microsoft. That will take you from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and activate it for you.

There are likely to be some other choices too.

 

[JamesandBennie]

This is actually not a complicated process, but just sometimes goes wrong. I'd also suggest to directly clone everything on the old HDD to the new SSD, but of course, the space on the SSD must be larger than the existing data on the HDD. So this way, you got the old HDD remain untouched so that if something goes wrong you can still boot to the system. As to disk clone, you can use fee Easeus todo backup which has the "clone HDD to SSD" feature. Or Macrium reflect can also do the job.

 

[bazz2004]

Yes the matter of the size of the SSD relative to the old drive is important when you clone. So long as the SSD is of larger capacity it's going to be straightforward.