Vista 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit

[leslie65]

My computer is all messed up. I bought it with Vista on it and then instaled windows 7 on it. The dell drivers are in conflict with windows 7. I can't even do a system restore because I can not get logged in. Any suggestions? I'm so ticked off about this.

 

[Hawkeye22]

This is why I always recommend running the win 7 upgrade advisor

http://windows.microsoft.com/upgradeadvisor

or at least check the compatibility site.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/windows-7/en-us/default.aspx

There is no inplace upgrade when going from 32 bit to 64 bit. Your only option is/was a clean install.

Since this is a dell system, it should have come with the necessary disks to reinstall Vista.

 

[CaedenV]

reformat, try again.
As a general rule of thumb, ALWAYS install a fresh copy of windows instead of upgrading. It will run faster and much smoother with a nice clean registry, and you don't have the issues of going 32->64bit.
So go take your HDD to a friend's house and get your data off of it, reformat the whole drive, and start over. It's not as bad as it sounds

 

[fowang]

also you cannot upgrade from 32bit to 64bit you have to install from scratch!

 

[electrontau]

DO NOT REFORMAT THE HARD DRIVE!!!

If you do you might delete the recovery partition. To reinstall Vista, press F10 (or F11 can't remember). Once back to vista, be sure to create the recovery DVDs. There is a dell utility to do that.

Afterwards do a clean Win7 install. But first run the windows upgrade advisor to see if your hardware is compatible with Win7.

 

[AntiZig]

well you can try to download 64 bit drivers from dell, log in in safe mode and install the drivers, hopefully fixing all your problems

alternatively you can reformat the hard drive before installing a new OS like win7 and install the appropriate drivers then