Oh for crying out loud!

Look, there's a standard for what happens when you buy a software upgrade. Either that's just done on the honor system or the upgrade install asks to see your original software disc. Not so Windows 7 (which I'm learning to hate just as much as you might think). No. The plan for installing a Windows 7 upgrade on a freshly formatted hard drive is to install XP or Vista first and then install Windows 7 over top of it.
The product key is for an upgrade version of Windows 7 and a previous version of Windows wasn't on your computer when Windows 7 was installed. To install an upgrade version of Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP must be installed on your computer. If you formatted the drive before starting the installation process, you won't be able to use the upgrade product key to activate Windows 7. To activate Windows 7, you'll need to install your previous version of Windows, and then reinstall Windows 7. For help with the activation process, go to the Microsoft Support website.
- from the Windows support site If only XP and Vista had a bullshit registration system such that Microsoft could identify product keys for those products ... then this could simply ask for two 25 character strings - the original license and the upgrade. But nooooo. I'm going to try copying an old XP virtual machine and see if I can upgrade that. We'll see. Grrr.
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Upgrading from Windows 7 RC

Are you somebody who has been running the Windows 7 RC until its last gasp like me? Were you troubled to find out that you can't upgrade from the RC to a release copy of Windows 7? Well, here's a site explaining how to talk the release version into upgrading a RC machine. This saved me several hours this weekend as well a probable trip onsite to get domain & admin stuff sorted out. (And a hat tip to Lifehacker, where I saw the link.) If you did go read that you might be shaking your head to yourself and going "it can't be that easy". It is - I just finished the upgrade and everything is working fine. I had to reinstall some system-level tools - the VMWare Fusion tools and the Cisco VPN client but after that it looks great. The reason you can't upgrade Windows 7 RC to a legitimate purchased copy of Windows 7 is that there's a text file listing a minimum version number that blocks it. Edit that text file to include the RC version number (7100) and there's no problem at all. Microsoft deliberately chose to screw over the RC users. Note that even as it was it took several hours to install. I bought a legal copy of the software, my RC install was completely patched. It really should have been a simple "Oh OK here's a legitimate license key that I paid for. We cool?" five minute thing. Really the whole mess is just hostile. Fuckin' Microsoft ....
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Out of the pool!

So that's it then. My Windows Boot Camp install started doing that "boot to a black screen" thing again, as bitched about previously. Now I'm suspicious that it's due to my OS X reformat and/or a VMWare Fusion upgrade but I've just had it with Windows. If it won't behave like a grown-up piece of software then it's going to get treated like a second-class citizen. I'm setting up a brand-new Windows install in a VMWare machine and once it gets all upgraded, patched, and activated I'm going to save the whole stinking virtual machine, burn a DVD archive. Next time Windows blows up I can just clone a working install. Shades of Norton Ghost, years later. I haven't decided if I'm going to try to resurrect the Boot Camp version or not. I'm sure the whole restore thing would work. And I further suspect that if I just resurrected the Boot Camp version and left it alone it would be fine. Except ... I think the last time I "activated" the obnoxious DRM I was in VMWare and so I'm not sure if the restored backup is "activated". Feh. I throw up my hands. Anyway, I'm going to try life without a "real" Windows install for a while. I don't think I'll really miss it.
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No, really Microsoft - go fuck yourselves

So today I needed to fire up Windows real quick to look at something. VMWare is unhappy about something or another, and ultimately it tells me that I'm going to have to reboot the Boot Camp partition. Well I was busy right then, so I ignored it until later in the evening. Started the reboot (man, booting into Windows seems SO SLOW these days) and wandered off to watch some TV. Came back, screen is black. (sigh) I'll skip over the painful diagnostics - something is wrong with Windows. Safe Mode works, but normal boot (as well as the "Last Known Good" configuration, aka "has this ever fucking worked in the entire history of this piece-of-crap OS?") just locks up somewhere before displaying a login screen. This is where I'm going to gloat about the awesomeness of my backup strategy. Throw in the BartPE disc, boot from it, hit restore, wait about two hours and blam! The Windows partition is back to a "Last Known Good" configuration that actually y'know works! Windows boots up, doesn't even seem to know anything was ever awry. Whew! Crisis averted.
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