Dell Windows 7 upgrade assistant CD/DVD will not run...

Just the generic windows vista notification that the program crashed, (stopped working unexpectedly/unresponsive) and that they will notify me when there is a solution. There is no error code, nothing, the disk simply crashes without loading anything at all and it crashes within seconds of being inserted into the drive (autorun) or manually trying to click the exe file in explorer.

danaarmstrong,

Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.

What is the exact error message you receive when running the Dell Upgrade Assistant Disk.

I had the same problem with a UK supplied factory fresh Studio XPS 16. Dell customers eligible for an upgrade are provided with 2 x DVDs, one is the operating system (OS) and the other is the Upgrade Assistant. A good step towards resolving this would be to download and run the Microsoft Windows 7 Advisor at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1B544E90-7659-4BD9-9E51-2497C146AF15&displaylang=en.

In my case, the Microsoft adviser suggested that two installed applications were incompatible with Windows 7 - ATI Catalyst and Power DVD. The long-winded way to proceed with the upgrade would then be to remove any incompatible applications, re-start your system, then boot up off the OS disk (if necessary change the BIOS settings first to allow system to boot from DVD), then perform the upgrade. Afterwards, you can download the Windows 7 versions of Dell's OEM software and drivers from here: https://smartsource.dell.com/web/UserForms/RegisterSystem.aspx

However, I'm still looking for a simpler way to perform an assisted upgrade using the DVD supplied, and await a call back from Dell's "premium" support engineers.

PS - there's another identical case on this forum, it would be good to x-ref them http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19306283.aspx 

I had already run the advisor before I ever inserted that disk. And I am not uninstalling software that CAME ON MY MACHINE DIRECT FROM DELL even if it had been incompatible. You'd think at least the DELL PROVIDED software would at least work on a DELL machine.

But then again I've not been too impressed by DELL at all. Lousy laptop, lousy customer service, corrupted software. Yup, not ever buying another Dell product if you paid me.

I'm having the same problem as well.  I have a Dell Studio XPS and when I insert the Dell Windows 7 upgrade Assistant DVD 64BIT, nothing happens.....  I mean the DVD drive starts to work but the DVD doesn't play.  I try to explore the disk and the message says, "There is no disk in drive E  Insert a disk and then try again."  It's like dell shipped me a blank disk!

If you guys come up with a solution,  please let me know.

Thanks a lot for the info rsmeeton. I'll try that if we get no (further (or helpful)) response from Dell, because I'm quite eager to get Windows 7 installed on my machine, since I've been EXTREMELY unhappy with Vista... I'm not so fond of having to go to that website for drivers though , because I never really manage to get all the correct ones (and it's quite tedious really). But thank you for the link anyway - I may have to end up using it.

Agbulosac, it sounds like you have faulty media, which Dell should replace if you fill in this form https://win7.dell.com/ContactLTG.aspx with your service tag number etc. You can check whether the DVD is faulty by inserting it in another machine, and just browsing the disk. The Dell Upgrade Assistant DVD contains about 2.7GB of files, and has versions for 32bit and 64bit editions. It includes all the Windows 7 drivers and Dell's OEM software on the DVD, which would save you downloading these manually. What the upgrade assistant is "supposed" to do is give you an automated way of identifying what software is incompatible, removing it, and re-installing the compatible version afterwards. There's also a feature (if it works) that allows you to temporarily uninstall software which just needs to be removed during the upgrade.

Provided the operating system disk (the one with the product key) is ok, then you'll still be able to perform the upgrade directly from that. You can either insert the Operating System (OS) disk with your current version of Windows running, or you can boot of the OS DVD. You'll then be given the option to upgrade directly from. It would be advisable to run the Microsoft upgrade advisor first though (see link further back). On a Studio XPS with a Dell Factory Image you should just have to temporarily uninstall the ATI Catalyst (video drivers) and Power DVD, then put them back on after the upgrade, either from the DVD (if you have one) or by downloading from Dell's web site.

If your operating system DVD also appears blank, then the chances are your DVD drive is faulty, in which case you can get this replaced under Dell's hardware support. If this is the case and you can't wait for a replacement drive, provided you've got access to another computer, you could copy the files from DVD to a portable USB hard drive, then run the upgrade assistant and windows 7 upgrade from that.

By the way, anyone out there who's partitioned their machine to dual boot with other operating systems and is using a Linux boot loader, will find that a Windows 7 upgrade removes all non-windows options from the startup menu. You'll have to repair this afterwards by booting from your linux install CD and re-instating the master boot record after the Windows 7 upgrade.

Danaarmstrong, this isn't a faulty disk, but incompatible software. The "dell upgrade assistant has stopped working" error seems to only affect 64 bit Vista installations. I don't work for Dell, and I don't think anyone else on this thread does either, but I'm a senior IT Manager and a long-standing Dell Customer. I too have spent time on the phone with Dell support, and they have failed to call me back when promised and so far they haven't got a fix, other than the manual upgrade method outlined above.

The contact form just sends an email to  Win7Upgrade@dell.com , so try emailing that instead. If we all do this and link our message to this post, then hopefully someone in the Dell Windows 7 Upgrade Team* will finally get the message that this is serious and needs a proper fix.    

*Hours of support operation are Monday - Friday 7:00 am - 7:00pm CST, closed on weekends.

Thank you, I've been on hold with Dell today 1 hour 32 minutes and counting... my cell is just sitting here on speaker while I wait and every 30 seconds I get told "we know your time is valuable and your wait time may be more than 5 minutes..."  This is getting ridiculous. I can't even just do a clean install because DISK two they sent is only an upgrade option and not a full version of Windows 7 which blows. I would have just clean installed and given up on the upgrade. But all the drivers are on Disk one so DISK 2 is useless without Disk 1. I'm only semi-technically savvy and would not know where to start to manually install the drivers off disk #1.

Thanks for the e-mail.... I'll try that. I appreciate it very much.

Same problem here when inserting the Upgrade Assistant (in french : "Dell Upgrade Assistant a cessé de fonctionner"). XPS 730 X with Vista 64 bits Ultimate. Three such identical machines were bought, but they evolved differently since one month, before receiving the Windows 7 upgrade... One of them could upgrade to Window 7 Ultimate without problem. One is stucked at the stage of the Upgrade Assistant not functioning. The DVD Assistant from the upgraded machine is still not functioning on the problematic machine. No answer from the DELL Support about that crazy problem. Not yet tried on the third machine... Seems that the different stories (different additional software installed) of the 3 machines have an effect, but what is causing the problem is unclear. All suggestions in this thread (and more) were tried without success. To be noted are frequent problems like "not responding", "stopped functioning" encountered with these 64 bit machines when using Internet Explorer for instance, forcing to restart - quite boring.

In my case, see the exact error message (in french...) there :

http://www.cristal.org/DELL/Image1.jpg

Armlb, the screenshot looks identical (apart from the language) to the errors we're seeing on other machines. If you click the "more information" you should be able to to see a "Process Exception" trace similar to this:

 Problem signature: Problem Event Name: CLR20r3 Problem Signature 01:
 win7_upgrade_start.exe Problem Signature 02: 1.0.0.0 Problem Signature 03:
 4a958908 Problem Signature 04: System.Drawing Problem Signature 05:
 2.0.0.0 Problem Signature 06: 4889dec2 Problem Signature 07: 7af Problem
 Signature 08: 6c Problem Signature 09: System.ArgumentException

Having looked at a number of similar issues with the Upgrade Assistant failing half way through, I have a suspicion that the problem may be video display mode and/or the video drivers, and that it only affects 64 bit installations. Were there any differences that you can remember between the machine that upgraded successfully and the ones that won't, especially on the screen resolution? In one case someone was able to run the upgrade assistant after starting up in VGA mode.

I still haven't got any response from Dell, but its worth checking out the other recent posts relating to Windows 7 on this forum from DELL-Jesse L 

Here is a link to the other windows 7 upgrade fault that was fixed by use of low resolution mode. In this case the upgrade assistant ran but locked up at the final boot.

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19305991/19595196.aspx#19595196

In this case the problem was windows 7 incorrectly detecting the display capabilities, and using VGA mode in the windows startup options overcame this. With our faults, changing the resoltion within the graphics driver with windows running wouldn't make any difference, and neither should the installation status of any user application such as Office, compilers etc.  However, removing the graphics driver altogether might. I'm not able to test this at the moment as I'm away on business, but will do this later in the week.  (I have previously tried re-loading the factory image from the recovery partition, and the upgrade assistant still failed!)