What I thought would be a 1 hour task took closed to 10 frustrating hours.
I completely wiped my entire computer and re-established the RAID system. When I bought Windows 7 upgrade I created a boot CD and thought I’d just put that in and install windows. Well the install went through just fine until I had to enter my product code. Apparently since I bought the upgrade I needed to have another verison of Windows already installed. So no problem I figured I would just use the Vista CD that came with my computer. Well it isn’t a bootable disk which posed as a problem. I attempted to create a USB boot disk following a few instructions from web sites, but that didn’t seem to work.
I decided to cheat a bit then. I re-isntalled Windows 7 using my disk and then found a product code online that worked for a Dell (32KD2-K9CTF-M3DJT-4J3WC-733WD — XXXXX-OEM-8992671-00524 — DELL). I made sure to keep my computer offline as I imagine the product code is banned by Microsoft.
Once Windows 7 was installed I used my legal Windows Vista 32-bit CD and did a full clean install. From there I then did a full install to Windows 7 64-bit using my paid product code.
So in total it took 3 installs to get my PC back working, but in reality it took me about 12 attempts to get there. Not a fun time to get back up and running and I’m really disappointed to find out that Dell didn’t give me the tools to install Vista on my own.