Windows-7, Windows-Vista – Troubleshooting Failed Upgrade to Windows 7

I've upgraded three PCs from Vista to Windows 7 without incident, but the fourth one is a bit of a problem.

The Windows 7 install fails and rolls back to Vista with:

The upgrade was not successful. Your previous version of Windows is being restored

The Windows 7 upgrade advisor, both on-disc and the downloadable one from the Microsoft website, shows no potential problems for this PC prior to the upgrade, just standard warnings about iTunes reactivation and so forth.

This is my second attempt at upgrading this PC to Win7; after the first failure and rollback, I uninstalled a ton of unused software from the PC via add/remove programs, but the second attempt ended up the same as the first.

I really don't want to have to do a clean install on this PC, so are there any post-install logs or anything I can investigate to see why exactly why Win7 is failing to upgrade this PC from Vista, and to fix it?

Based on one of the suggestions, I checked this path

c:\$WINDOWS.~BT\sources\setuperr.log

Which contained this line

SetupGetInfDriverStoreLocationW failed for 'C:\Windows\inf\oem28.inf'[gle=0x00000490]

I checked that oem28.inf file and it relates to a printer on that computer — so I went ahead and removed the printer and deleted the printer driver:

• right-click within the Printers folder
• select "Server Printer"
• select Drivers tab, click driver, click Remove
• confirm

as documented here. Now I'll try the upgrade again..

No dice. Still rolls back (but the printer error is gone from the log!). Some relevant lines from the setuperr.log file:

Failed to find driver file path. Error=00000002x {repeated ~ 6 times}
Failed to find driver file path. Error=ffffffffx {repeated ~ 6 times}
Plugin {e0cbf06c-cd8b-4647-bb8a-263b43f0f974}: BthMig: Failed to migrate bthport keys, bailing out
Failure while calling IDiscovery->Gather for Plugin={ServerPath="%windir%\system32\drmmgrtn.dll", CLSID={743B7FD2-8427-4b7d-B330-A95618DE2BFC}, ThreadingModel=Apartment}. Error: 0x80070057
Failed to check the certificate of the catalog file C:\Windows\System32\catroot\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE}\1.CAT.[gle=0x800b010a]
Failure while calling IPostApply->PostApply for Plugin={ServerPath="%windir%\system32\drmmgrtn.dll", CLSID={743B7FD2-8427-4b7d-B330-A95618DE2BFC}, ThreadingModel=Apartment}. Error: 0x80070057

I finally tried uninstalling all drivers from this PC (all it had were the Nvidia drivers really), and attempted to do a third upgrade. Same problem. I watched it this time, so I know exactly what happened — it got very, very far into the upgrade, after the video drivers are installed and so forth, then bluescreened at boot with DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL at the final stage and rolled back to Vista again. I assume that was the same thing that was happening before.

Oh well, I guess I have no choice but to do a clean install. 🙁