Upgrading Windows 1.0 to 7

[cbronson]

The guy passed through all versions of Windows (except ME) in a VM, just to see if the upgrading process would keep the pink background and play Doom II.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

Heh in real life, installing 7 on a 386 or 486 would take a little bit longer...

[Bucket]

Although DOS will install on a Pentium III just fine.

[Aliotroph?]

It's amazing that it still booted after that.

[AirRaid]

I don't see why it's amazing it booted. Each Upgrade setup is designed to make sure it boots after install. That's.. kind of the point of the installer.

It's neat that so many legacy programs survived the various updates though. I called that XP onwards wouldnt remember theme settings and such though.

[chungy]

This is pointlessly stupid like something I'd probably do out of boredom. :P

And yes, it's not a big surprise it still booted, but how well the final Windows 7 stage of the upgrade process still works is rather questionable (though this is also just plain old clean Windows installs, nothing that has months/years of regular use, installs, uninstalls, reinstalls of programs, etc, to clutter up the filesystem and registry). The XP->Vista upgrade is possibly the most dangerous one in this process, it has to gut out so much of the XP system to fit all the new Vista models.... there's a reason Microsoft decided to not allow direct XP->7 upgrades, and that's pretty much because of how often the XP->Vista failed (and OS issues don't always manifest themselves right away, sure it will boot fine and you can probably start up Firefox you had installed on XP fine, but there's always smaller things that go wrong ...); Vista->7 on the other hand... it's practically the exact same operating system, it's like upgrading 2000->XP.

in another note, I find it somewhat funny how he decided not to go to Windows Me since it can't be upgraded to Windows 2000 (which a couple times in the past annoyed me, but it makes sense from the point that 2000 was released first, the installer didn't know that Me is pretty much exactly like 98 and would probably work the same), it could have gone just 98->Me->XP. On that matter, "every version of Windows"... hmm, he's leaving out NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, and 4.0 :-)

[Enjay]

chungy said:

Vista->7 on the other hand... it's practically the exact same operating system, it's like upgrading 2000->XP.

Despite the similarity of Vista and 7 I know a few people who have done that upgrade and there has been enough registry (etc) mess to confuse and slow 7 or just enough obsolete trash lying around on the hard drive to cause some confusion.

[DanG]

The XP->Vista upgrade is possibly the most dangerous one in this process, it has to gut out so much of the XP system to fit all the new Vista models.... there's a reason Microsoft decided to not allow direct XP->7 upgrades, and that's pretty much because of how often the XP->Vista failed (and OS issues don't always manifest themselves right away, sure it will boot fine and you can probably start up Firefox you had installed on XP fine, but there's always smaller things that go wrong ...)

That may explain why so many people bitched about Vista problems even though it worked perfectly smooth for me. I got a rig that had Vista pre-installed, and I'm guessing those people had upgraded from XP. In fact I find Windows 7 to be quirkier than Vista.

[Enjay]

DanG said:

That may explain why so many people bitched about Vista problems even though it worked perfectly smooth for me. I got a rig that had Vista pre-installed, and I'm guessing those people had upgraded from XP. In fact I find Windows 7 to be quirkier than Vista.

That and people upgrading probably had more old software and hardware that they wanted to work with the new OS only to find that it didn't. (But by the time Win 7 came out most people had changed out their hardware and upgraded their software so the compat issues had gone.)

[chungy]

Enjay said:

Despite the similarity of Vista and 7 I know a few people who have done that upgrade and there has been enough registry (etc) mess to confuse and slow 7 or just enough obsolete trash lying around on the hard drive to cause some confusion.

True enough, and if you read around MS blogs, plenty of developers and engineers at Microsoft don't even believe there should be an upgrade feature just because of how often it goes wrong...

[Csonicgo]

Well regardless it shows how dedicated they are to making sure compatibility and settings are kept. You gotta give MS credit for that. I'm sure that one day they'll just emulate all that or do away with it, and someone will give them shit for it. Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.

[Aliotroph?]

It still amazes me upgrades to Vista ever work. They were so unreliable Dell would barely support them, despite handing the discs out like candy. What we did was try and solve the mess that happened when people did the upgrades. For example, one guy had AVG installed and did the upgrade. It broke AVG and prevented it from uninstalling. I got to spend some time registry hacking over his slow net connection so I could install a new version. bleagh

It is very impressive so many of settings remain intact through several versions. I wonder how many programmers went insane looking for all the little quirks in features like that.

[neubejiita]

I saw this on /.. The guy had old msdos versions and that would have been fun to upgrade, but one commenter noted that if he had wanted to upgrade from MSDOS 1.0 the interface of such old hardware supported by the OS would not be around now and you would not be able to start from the very beginning of Microsoft. And besides, upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 is pretty cool, but I would love to see a video of someone using DOS 1.0 to DOS 6.22 that would be pretty awesome if it was possible to get it running in a VM.

[chungy]

I'm not sure if it's possible to upgrade DOS 1.0 to 2.0... much of the system changed, including the introduction of directories. But beside that, MS-DOS's system files were MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS, and COMMAND.COM(*) in the root directory of the boot device (C: on a hard disk, A: or B: from a floppy). No registry to worry about, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were optional and also could be bypassed in case of any problems in the files (press F5 on the "Booting MS-DOS" prompt iirc). It'd actually be a rather boring series of video to upgrade DOS. Windows is a complex beast and it makes this more interesting =p

(*) Strictly speaking, COMMAND.COM is also optional and could be switched for another shell in CONFIG.SYS. In reality pretty much every MS-DOS system had it.

[Enjay]

chungy said:

(*) Strictly speaking, COMMAND.COM is also optional and could be switched for another shell in CONFIG.SYS. In reality pretty much every MS-DOS system had it.

Indeed. "Back in the day" I used to use 4DOS as my CLI in preference to command.com.

[Maes]

Didn't actually watch the video (I'm on dial-up these days...damn) but "upgrading 1.0 all the way to 7" with real hardware (even if you use a system that can actually run all of them, and not, say, a 386) is technically impossible, at least if you don't migrate the disk's contents between different file systems along the way.

Windows 1.0->3.11 are not even OSes, they require DOS and DOS itself can only use FAT filesystems, which limits disk sizes to 4 GB Maximum. Windows 95 (and 98?) could still use FAT without forcing you to convert to FAT32 (which could be done at installation time), but Windows XP or 2000 will not install on a pure FAT disk, and will not even offer an option to convert anymore.

Then there's disk space. I know for a fact that XP will install on a 2 GB disk (howevr it only leaves 600 MB or so of space to play with), but I doubt Vista and 7 will even accept to install on anything smaller than 4 GB.

Then there's the issue of how much of the previous system is actually preserved between upgrades. DOS and Windows up to 3.x have no concept of "registry" or "program files", or even of "user desktop", they're just a bunch of files scattered on the disk, and for the most part, the actual standalone Windows OSes ignored them, except for old autoexec.bats etc. I think they allowed you to still run Windows 3.x from a shell or a clean boot by moving the 3.x directory somewhere else, as well as preserve the old DOS version if you wished (by keeping the disk in FAT format), but that's about it.

The only common thing between Windows versions is the Windows directory. Upgrading from 3.11 to 95 did preserve some things like program groups, ini files etc. but the main OS was a wholly different beast: it added System32 files and drivers, the registry etc. and Windows 3.1 existed only as thin compatibility vestige (and there still is a "Windows 3.1 migration status" entry in XPs registry, somewhere).

Windows 2000 and XP (and Vista/7?) in turn keep nothing from the 9x branch: the drivers are brand new, the DLLs and system kernel is pure protected mode 32-bit (rather than a real mode/protected mode 16/32-bit mishmash present in 9x), there's no pure DOS mode or reboot option (not even an option to boot to DOS if it is detected during installation, due to filesystem limitations), and most programs won't work due to a different application model, especially those that weren't pure Win32 apps. However, whatever uses the Win16, Win32 and GDI APIs will still work (on 32-bit versions) directly.

Vista/7 have a significant driver model change compared to XP/2000 and that will sometimes fix things (e.g. AT FUCKING LAST VIA chipsets and SATA drivers are standard in Vista and 7 kernels, XP and 2000 required F6 and a floppy disk at installation) and most of the time they will break things (there's some duality here, as sometimes the XP driver will work just fine, sometimes it won't).

Anyway, on real hardware, you'd stumble upon physical disk space, RAM and even CPU type constraints during the process (e.g. Windows 95 would not install on a 286 while 3.x would, Windows XP would not install on a 486 while 9x would, 9x would work on a FAT disk while XP and above wouldn't, and there would be RAM size installation barriers to consider, too. Assuming that you could pump a 486 to 64 or more MB, you could conceivably run (but not directly install) XP on it, while a first gen pentium could maybe attempt to install Vista if you could max out the RAM at 256 MB (dunno what the lower bound for installation is). Then there would be disk size limits imposed by the filesystem and even disk controllers used.

TL; DR version: at several points in the process, the disk contents and system status itself will be refactored so many times, that it doesn't even technically make sense to talk about "upgrading" anymore. You're not just adding something on top of something existing, you're replacing it entirely. It's not like upgrading from B&W (analog) TV to Color (analog) TV, which keeps full backwards compatibility with old broadcasts. It's more like going straight to (MPEG 4) DTV, skipping cable and mpeg2 DTV along the way.

[SaladBadger]

While not covered in the video, the drive issue was apparently worked around by converting the drive to Fat32 before installing xp, and then to NTFS before installing vista.

edit: actually according to the blog they did it before installing xp