I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate RTM on my system and had a peculiar experience.
I was running Windows 7 Ultimate RC and decided to blow it for the RTM. My first hard drive is 250 Gigs with one primary partition (40 Gigs) and the remainder in the second partition. I had a number of files stored on that second partition and the OS on the 40 Gig partition. I had also created a Windows 7 RC System Image using the Windows Backup tool before installing the RTM. I booted off the RTM DVD and deleted the 40GB OS Partition and installed it there. When the OS loaded, all partitions and files were as I left them. I did notice that after the RTM setup was complete, Disk Management showed an extra System Partition before the OS partition which was not there earlier. I then realized that I needed a few files stored on my RC installation and so I used the System Image Recovery option from Windows Recovery Environment and reverted back to the RC. This is when the trouble started. Disk Management showed that there was no System Partition, which is understandable since I know that the RC had not made any such partition. However, after the Image Restore was complete, I also realized that my data partition (D: ) was empty. I then copied the required files to a flash drive and ran a chkdsk on drive D: to no avail. Essentially, the files on my D: partition were deleted AFTER I reverted back to RC using the image recovery option. The partition itself existed, including the label I had assigned to it! I know I did the recovery correctly as I've done it a number of times. I'm guessing this happened because the RC install did not have the Recovery Partition while the RTM did. What do you guys think?