Hacker's Guide To Installing Windows 7

Many people want to try the new Windows 7, but they're not too sure if Windows 7 is worth it. After all, it doesn't make sense to buy a new computer to try Windows 7 and then find out it's another lame bloatware. This guide will help an average joe to download, install and activate Windows 7 with freely available tools.

Hardware Requirements of Windows 7

First, you need to decide if your computer is capable of running Windows 7. According to Microsoft, Windows 7 has the following hardware requirements:

• 1 GHz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor
  
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
  
• DVD-ROM drive or DVD burner
  
• DirectX 9 graphics card with WDDM 1.0 or better driver

That means Windows 7 can run on most computers available. You may have to buy additional memory or a new video card to be able to run Windows 7. See the Windows 7 Compatibility site.

Next, decide which edition of Windows 7 you want to install on your computer. There are many editions of Windows 7, for example, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate. For most people, Windows 7 Home Premium is good enough.

Windows 7 Direct Downloads and Bittorrents

It is recommended that you use aria2, Halogenware Retriever or Free Download Manager to download Windows 7 so you can resume a download in the event of connection problems. On the Web, you can download DVD images of Windows 7 from the following locations:

• Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (x86 English) X17-24208.iso
  
  MD5: c5bb99b2f1a9e7a5b4fbc6e3eff70882
  
  SHA1: 22df3e5a80f8dbf014c2776a01b1cd9f24d83233
  
  CRC32: 9c5dc931
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (x64 English) X17-24209.iso
  
  MD5: 971843a457b6e0db0af61258cbe7256a
  
  SHA1: b4821f46a171708f5f8f8a0ef48fc16529437961
  
  CRC32: d236fd70
  
• Windows 7 Professional SP1 (x86 English) X17-24280.iso
  
  MD5: befd4f1e00ec8da2effbd789f4e66fbf
  
  SHA1: 917a542b0541054bb9c2a06a11a46aed6943856b
  
  CRC32: 20078d8d
  
• Windows 7 Professional SP1 (x64 English) X17-24281.iso
  
  MD5: 338f3245d68527db47b8a44e55317d0a
  
  SHA1: 5ed2584110e03f498db4458ba9fafd5a7ef602ed
  
  CRC32: 74f3cb73
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (x86 English) X17-24394.iso
  
  CRC32: C2966895
  
  MD5: 24F3A45D43D7C532AA3126CC094C61BD
  
  SHA1 : 92c1ada4ff09c76ec2f1974940624cab7f822f62
  
  SHA2: BBB5E0BAF3659F6DEC96B50381CBB05C09F066675EE639324B728215D5D47C43
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (x64 English) X17-24395.iso
  
  CRC32: 8589EE18
  
  MD5: 56A26636EC667799F5A7F42F142C772D
  
  SHA1: 1693b6cb50b90d96fc3c04e4329604feba88cd51
  
  SHA2: 9A2F3972FBBBB4974255CCCC26CDA9B1A75D9D0179867D6111162AC33F0CB693
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium (x86 English) X15-65732.iso
  
  SHA1: CC9D8220B2179E784D85BF1EA98D2EE2190D534F
  
  ISO/CRC: 5DF6DBA0
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium (x64 English) X15-65733.iso
  
  SHA1: 336779EA6B65F63E11A609B4D021439C47AB315B
  
  ISO/CRC: 56D954E4
  
• Windows 7 Professional (x86 English) X15-65804.iso
  
  SHA1: 697FA06554502FB21D30275273B25747299C020D
  
  ISO/CRC: 578725D1
  
• Windows 7 Professional (x64 English) X15-65805.iso
  
  SHA1: 50127304441A793EE51B3F501289F6599A559E9F
  
  ISO/CRC: 502C42C1
  
• Windows-7-SP1-EN-MSDN-TechNet.torrent

I like using aria2 for download. Get my aria2 win32 build from here. To use aria2c to download Windows 7 Home Premium, open the Command Prompt and type the following command.

aria2c --file-allocation=prealloc http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso

To stop the download, press Ctrl+C twice. Later, you can resume download with the command:

aria2c -c http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso

After the download has finished, verify the checksums of the download with md5deep or HashCheck shell extension.

This is optional. If you want to create a single All-in-One DVD that can be used to install Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate edition, download and run eicfg_remover. This tool removes ei.cfg from the ISO file.

Then, burn the image to a blank DVD. You need to have a DVD burner and a blank DVD, of course. For free DVD-burning software, you can get ImgBurn, InfraRecorder or CDBurnerXP.

Compiling Linux Kernel 2.6.38

Let's compile a Linux kernel. To build a kernel, I installed the following packages:

• binutils
  
• gcc-4.4
  
• libglade2-dev for "make gconfig"
  
• libqt3-mt-dev or libqt4-dev for "make xconfig"
  
• make
  
• module-init-tools
  
• patch
  

libglade2-dev is needed to configure the kernel by running “make gconfig”. In addition, I am going to include the following features.

• unionfs is a union filesystem that allows me to merge several filesystems into a single logical one. It has several uses, such as Live CD's and modifiable read-only filesystem.
  
• ndiswrapper allows me to use many network devices by installing native Windows drivers.
  

I downloaded the kernel source and unpacked it.

tar xjvf linux-2.6.38.tar.bz2
cd linux-2.6.38

Then, I applied the unionfs patch.

gzip -dc ../unionfs-2.5.3_for_2.6.18.8.diff.gz | patch -p1 -l

Then, I configured the kernel with a GTK configuration tool.

cp /boot/config-2.6.31.5 .config
make gconfig

Open Makefile with an editor and define EXTRAVERSION if necessary.

Now let's compile the kernel.

make bzImage
make install
make modules
make modules_install
depmod -e -F /boot/System.map-2.6.38 -m 2.6.38

Set the default root device and ramdisk size for the new kernel.

cd /boot
rdev vmlinuz-2.6.38 1,0
ramsize vmlinuz-2.6.38 4096

Finally, compile ndiswrapper (Patches available here).

tar xzf ndiswrapper-1.55.tar.gz
cd ndiswrapper-1.55
KVERS=2.6.31.6 make uninstall
KVERS=2.6.31.6 make
KVERS=2.6.31.6 make install

Generate modules.* files.

depmod -e -m -F /boot/System.map-2.6.31.6 2.6.31.6