Are you one of the many Media Center users already running a Vista Media Center and planning to upgrade to a new Windows 7 install? If so, it’s likely that you’d want to move your recording schedule over as well. For those planning to do a simple upgrade the process should be automatic, however, if you’re planning a clean install it’s going to take a bit more planning and effort. Media Center developer Danny Ton has posted the method to getting this done over at The Green Button for those planning on a clean install of Windows 7 from Windows Vista.

This method will work for anyone who is moving from a basic Windows Vista install, without the Fiji pack installed, but will only copy the recording schedule. This means that the channel lineup and other custom settings will not be carried over and will need to be setup by the user. The recording schedule works by scanning the TV lineup for shows listed in the schedule then marking them for recording. The schedule is actually more of a list than a schedule, containing a list of shows and a set of rules for recording than a list of times, dates and channels to be recorded.

To get started, the files we need to access are located inside a hidden folder so we should enable the viewing of such folders. In the Control Panel, select Appearance and Personalization then Folder Options. Under the View tab in Folder Options select the Show Hidden files and folders option and press OK.

Once you’ve enabled the viewing of hidden folders open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Program Data\microsoft\ehome\recording. Copy the contents of the folder to a backup location such as a flash drive or network storage location. Now proceed with your clean installation of Windows 7.

Once you’ve completed your clean install, follow the steps above to show hidden folders once again and locate the C:\Program Data\microsoft\ehome\recording directory (or create it if it doesn’t exist). Now place the recordings.xml file you backed up from Windows Vista into the folder before running the Windows 7 Media Center setup.

During the initial setup of Windows 7 Media Center the recordings.xml will be converted into the Windows 7 Media Center recordings schedule and all of your recordings should be processed once the TV guide listings have been processed. If you’ve already run the initial setup you can also achieve the same results by running the TV Signal Setup from the Settings area.

Once the machine has had time to scan the TV guide listings for your scheduled show recordings you should be able to view scheduled recordings from Recorded TV’s view scheduled area. That’s all there is to it! You should now have a completely transferred recording schedule from Windows Vista into Windows 7.