Okay, I am in Antarctica and have a Windows 7 RTM Professional product key, thanks to my college. But I got a Windows 7 Ultimate ISO with me. I installed the Ultimate easily to USB using VHD, but no need for this, nor ghost. I have Windows XP already on my EEEPC internal lil 4g solid state drive. yippeee.
ImageX works with the install.wim inside the Windows 7 ISO. You can find it and the directions I followed here.
So I got the ISO on the internets, extracted it, with lovely free 7-zip, to a fresh NTFS formatted USB hard drive, and ran imagex. I edited the ei.cfg thinking it'd install professional, oops. Of course it didn't. The setup program reads ei.cfg, imagex looks at 'image index' which those instructions just gave the number 5. Index 4 is for professional. If you want to know the rest, imagex /info install.wim and look through that. In mine, 1=Starter, 2=HomeBasic, 3=HomePremium, 4=Professional, 5=Ultimate.
I already had the BCD boot loader installed, but that shouldn't be too tough to figure out.
Okay, so all the files are on the USB drive, but it won't boot USB just yet. Either edit the \windows\system32\config\SYSTEM hive in regedit to change USB services to start at boot-time, or use UsbBootWatcher that someone made here.
After setup does its thing and reboots, you need to go back into XP and run it again tho, because setup will hose what UsbBootWatcher did. It shouldn't mess up again tho.
A Voila. Got Windows 7 Pro legit on my netbook, without use of any of my usual hacker resources (broadband internet, bittorrent, ghost, cdrom, etc) hah. Easiest method yet! :)
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