E.g. can you just mount or extract the iso and run Setup.exe from your local hard drive and have it work without any external bootable media on which the W7 install lives? I googled and got some conflicting info.

To make things clear, I'm looking to install W7 on a machine without an optical drive without installing with a USB flash drive or doing a network share of an optical drive.

Yes, but not to the partition that the current OS is running on. Well, maybe... I never tried.

You can install to the current partition from inside Windows when you're using a disc, so if you were to mount the ISO, I'd think it should still work that way.

I'm not positive because I havent tried yet but I would guess yes because the Student Upgrade Version isnt even an ISO (although it can be converted to one). It's 3 files and I think it was meant to be launched from within Vista.

No, I don't believe you can. Several restarts are required.

I am 150% positive you can. Note that you will obviously not have the option to reformat, as it will copy the install files to the partition. It will proceed to move your old windows install to Windows.old

All it does is copy the installer and change the bootloader to load the installer on reboot. Once it finishes that, it reboots, loads the installer, and that's when the actual installing begins.

The disc is only used in the first stage of the installation. All of the install data is copied to the hard drive before the first reboot occurs.

And yep, CM is spot on. It won't let you format the paritition, but it will move all of your old files into the Windows.Old folder, which you can either delete or keep.

I did a clean install from the student offer downloaded thing to the same partition that Vista was on without a hitch.

Matty: Will this work with an in-place upgrade installation from Vista as well? (Don't yell at me for doing an upgrade instead of clean install :tinfoil:)

Try it. It's one of the first options it asks you anyway, so you'll know right off the bat.

backup first!!!

Install from HDD like you could with 2K?
I did it a week ago, no experience doing it with Win7 though.

It's been a while since I installed it, but I believe that is how I did it.