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Two words: Clean install.

We’ve also learned that many of you (millions) are running Windows 7 Beta full time. You’re anxious for a refresh. You’ve installed all your applications. You’ve configured and customized the system. You would love to get the RC and quickly upgrade to it from Beta. The RC, however, is about getting breadth coverage to validate the product in real-world scenarios. As a result, we want to encourage you to revert to a Vista image and upgrade or to do a clean install, rather than upgrade the existing Beta. We know that means reinstalling, recustomizing, reconfiguring, and so on. That is a real pain. The reality is that upgrading from one pre-release build to another is not a scenario we want to focus on because it is not something real-world customers will experience. During development we introduce changes in the product (under the hood) that aren’t always compatible with what we call “build-to-build” upgrade. The supported upgrade scenario is from Windows Vista to Windows 7. [emphasis added]

This was to be expected. After all, given all the changes since the Beta 1 build and the RC build, it’s unrealistic to expect to be able to upgrade and guarantee no problems. However, given that the Beta 1 build was released early January, and it’s now early April, beta testers have had three months to set up their systems and get comfortable. Back when Vista was being beta tested, testers had access to new builds regularly, so test systems were always in a state of flux.

However, if you really want to avoid carrying out a clean install, Microsoft has offered a workaround:

1. Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
2. Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
3. Browse to the sources directory.
4. Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
5. Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
6. Save the file in place with the same name.
7. Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.