Upgrade Windows 7 Beta to RC

The Windows 7 Release Candidate will be released to the world on May 5th and the many millions of beta testers will definitely want to download and use it; however upgrading straight from the beta to the RC won’t be easy.

Microsoft would prefer that you go back to Vista and then upgrade to Windows 7 RC, that way will give them the correct metrics to analyse the upgrade process. That’s fair enough but it’s a bit of a hassle doing that so there is a way to get from A to B without going via Vista:

Here’s what you can do to bypass the check for pre-release upgrade IF YOU REALLY REALLY NEED TO:

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.

See more over @ the Engineering Windows 7 blog here.