Upgrading from 32bit XP to windows 7 32bit OR 64bit

[asterick]

well my dad just got the 3Xlicensing pack of windows 7 I got to install it to his working laptop and home laptop both were vista 32 and 64 bit and went through flawlessly without a problem. But for my PC which is a 32bit XP all the hardware is 64bit capable - at least for xp/vista

specs: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHZ CPU

EVGa 260 GTX
ASUS 680i P5N32-SLI Motherboard
320 GB Hitachi HDD
2X2GB Corsair 800mhz memory

I really want to upgrade to 64bit windows 7 but after lots of restarting and googling i couldnt find a procedure that i felt comfortable doing so i fell back to the 32bit one and it would install all the way up til it did its first reboot and it gets stuck in "starting windows" and turns to BSOD with the OXOOOOO7B (i dont know if the number of 0's is correct i just know it was 7B at the end) this happened both times, I even took out 1 stick of ram to make it 2gigs in my PC since i saw a random forum post of that solving one of the problems. I am ready to lose all data i have, i already put any photo/documents i need on a flash drive so i dont mind reformatting it. But i would like to know if I really do need to format the HDD then put the installation CD in? any help even ideas are much appreciated thank you.

 

[Zoron]

It won't ask for a CD... at least mine didn't... but I did upgrade doing a clean install from Vista. You should be fine if your XP is running and activated.

 

[Mongox]

OK thanks. So as long as my boot partition is there and ready to be over-written, all is well. But if I want to install the Win7 Upgrade on a clean/blank drive for testing, it might want to "see" my old boot drive? Anyone run across this yet?