Upgrading to Vista Business

Here is my setup: Dell XPS 13 with a 128gb SSD, Vista 64-bit Home Premium and an external 500gb hard drive. I have a Vista Business 64-bit CD from school (completely legitimate) and want to upgrade primarily because of the backup utilities in Vista. I want to be able create full images and store them on the external hard drive.

The issue: Apparently you can't "upgrade" from Vista Home Premium to Vista Business. I spent much time on the phone with Microsoft and they said it just can't be done. This leaves me with the only option of formatting and a clean install. I need to retain my data, file structure, settings and programs. After talking to a tech at Microsoft (who was surprisingly helpful), we collectively came to the conclusion that the easiest solution was the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard. We are thinking that I should [in theory] be able to create a full backup onto my external hard drive (which I just did), do a clean Vista install and then recover using that backup.

He thought this would be fine using my logic which was that if you can migrate all programs, settings and files from like an XP computer to Vista, or from one Vista computer to another... you should be able to go from Vista Home Premium to Vista Business, even though it is the same physical computer.

I want to verify with everyone that this is a feasible solution to my issue unless someone else has a better idea. I appreciate the advice.

 

Windows Easy Transfer Wizard should be fine. The only upgrade path for Home Premium is to Ultimate unfortunately.

Just to be safe, perhaps download one of the free image backup utilities like O&O Disk Image (thanks to Cin') or DriveImage XML.

I know with Drive Image XML you can browse your data and extract individual files if you have to. Not so sure about O&O.

Just another alternative if you'd like.

 

I assume that you would only selectively recover, as opposed to doing a blanket recovery of all system files (for example).

 

Why do you think I would only be able to selectively restore files? The backup was about 40gb which is also about the size of used space on my drive. I also used the Windows backup tool to back everything up. I thought of creating an image but was under the impression that wouldn't work on a restore because it was a different OS. Will this restore my programs and everything or am I screwed?

 

I doubt if you're screwed, but once you're running on a different version of _Vista, you'll probably want to be careful about restoring something like the entire registry from the old Home Premium installation onto the new Business installation, given that there will be differences in the registry files corresponding to the different versions.