WinXPx32 to Win7x64 using student upgrade & bootable DVD

Hello,

First off: I am not trying to install an illegal copy of Win 7! I have a product key and I paid for it but it was the student download straight from the Microsoft Store with no DVD.

I am running a 2009 iMac Core 2 Duo (2.93 GHz, 3 GB RAM) as a dual boot setup. I have Mountain Lion fully upgraded on my Mac side, and I was running a legit copy of Windows XP SP2 on the Windows partition.

I hadn't been using PC recently but just went back to engineering grad school so I wanted to upgrade to Windows 7. I ran the system check and confirmed I could run x64 if I wanted to so I decided to go ahead and order the x64 edition. The backup disc option was "out of stock" so I had to just download the file.

There are two files - the x64 .exe and x64 .iso. I downloaded the .exe but since my Windows was x32 it could not run. I figured that I would need to boot from a DVD burned from the .iso. I looked up several different instructions and burned 3 DVDs in three different ways.
1) the downloaded .iso straight to a DVD using ImgBurn on XP
2) redownloaded .iso on Mac OS X, used Disk Utility
3) followed this instruction Make bootable iso from student d/l - Windows 7 Forums to burn the x64 .exe to a disc from XP using the utility in the link

All 3 discs are the same: XP won't run it while in XP and I can't boot using the DVD. Every time is the same. I select that disk from either XP's Boot Camp Assistant, or Mac OS X's Boot Camp Assistant, it just displays "press any key to boot from CD/DVD...." and goes straight to XP. Mashing the keyboard does not work. I have the Wireless keyboard.

Is there something I'm missing here? Or is it as simple as running to Best Buy and picking up a cheap USB wired keyboard to press a dang key? I don't remember having this problem with the official Windows XP install cd.

Thanks!

If you correctly created the Windows 7 x 64 bit DVD it should be bootable. Trying to install Windows with a wireless keyboard doesn't work so yes, you will need to have a wired USB keyboard. Any cheap Windows keyboard will work.

Keep in mind that you can not "upgrade" Windows XP x 32 bit to Windows 7 x 64 bit. You must install Windows 7 x 64 bit fresh. It doesn't mean that you have to remove XP first, just that it will not upgrade. What it should do during installation is save your XP Windows folder and data to another folder and then proceed with installing the 64 bit version of Windows 7.

Let us know how it went.