cannot upgrade from win7 to win10

PAFOS said:

There is no mismatch. Winver correct. I wanted to upgrade from Win 7 HP 64 bit to Win 10 Home 64 bit. To make sure that I had not downloaded the wrong Win 10 version I did a clean install on a spare PC (Using generic product key) and is ended up with Win 10 64 bit Home.

Sounds like you got off on the wrong direction simply by entering ANY product key when it wasn't necessary. This is half the problem most are running into by not looking over the upgrade and later on the clean install guides in the tutorial section that will take you through things step by step.

Here having to upgrade the 7 Ultimate edition for a planned dual boot I had even more fun just trying to get 10 to go on! With several desktops there you will definitely want to get familiar with the guides which can help avoid some real headaches like the need to unplug any storage/backup Non OS drives you have as well as unplug anything external when going to the initial upgrade on the first machine.

Still having a few other desktops and some laptops to consider both 7 Pro x64 and 7 Home Premium x86 on a pair of mini towers plus 7 HP on one or two laptops and 8 on another plus a full tower case with another potential 7/10 dual boot.... you get the picture fast. Here for the first two and later 32bit Pro downloads the initial upgrade attempts simply failed for things like those storage drives still being plugged in! Second the first move was to save the download to a drive in ISO form for later write to flash drive where the first was the combination 32bit/64bit ISO for 10 Pro.

The second time the tool was run I had the MC tool write the combination image too big for anf 4gb flash drive to a 16gb I had onhand. The third was to see the 64bit stand alone saved and followed after by the separate 32bit. Those two were written to flash drive by another 3rd party program I previously used for 7 and 8 USB Installation Keys which has always been reliable. A dvd also burned when trying to separate the 32bit from the 64bit combo iso scrubbed! But still even now both ISOs 32bit and 64bit separate have been downloaded for the Home edition.

Now here's one other thing to know! Following the initial upgrade as upgrades are well known for! things can get real buggy! After a sudden surprise last weekend even seeing 10 take despite my system being ready I was forced later to upgrade over the upgrade where now everything seems to go right on for most of the apps run on 7 as well as not having the bugs first seen of not even getting the expansion cards working as far as drivers and the software for each. The av program's installer wouldn't even start without an immediate stall!

Trick? first unplug everything else period! See ISO written to flash drive and then browse to the setup.exe while still in Windows as well as what? Shut down all programs even the antivirus to limit things to the basics as far as processes and let her rip! The clean install guide will also cover the possible UEFI(Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) issues you might run into. That's where you have to disable the UEFI in the bios setup in order to boot live from the flash drive when going to perform a clean install and on some older might cause a problem with the upgrade.

Now if may take a day or so for the automatic activation to take place where you then should be able to start clean installs. There is one thing that was looked into however originally how to extend the 30 day trial period for Windows 7 that was tried out on the second upgrade to repair install I had to see done when after now 5 full days it didn't activate on it's own. The old extend to 120days option saw the second upgrade of 10 over 10 temporarily activated!

At least you saw results for the four 8 machines while you may just have to see a clean install as well as make sure no extra drives are still plugged in on the two 7 machines! And don't panic if they don't activate as soon as those that had 8 on them. I ended up having to use the rearm code used to extend the Windows Vista and 7 trial periods from 30 to 120 days with a simple two step process note! When you get 10 on those other two and wait and wait for days and still neither activates which may not be the case for you there simply 1) go to the Start menu and scroll down a bit after a right click on the Start button itself until you reach the command prompt (admin) right under the command prompt item. Once you have that opened up 2) type in this command at the dos like prompt ">" with the blinking cursor. "slmgr /rearm" and simply press enter to watch as the trial period gets extended and when prompted to restart the machine and follow this up afterwards by looking in the Control Panel>System you should be able to scroll all the down and see "Windows is activated".

I tried several methods to install windows 10 successfully. In all cases I unplugged my SSD with Windows 7 Pro on it to protect a working OS. I prepared a HDD by simply deleting the whole disc leaving it in a Unallocated state.

Going into the Bios, I turned off Fast Boot and in Secure Boot, I selected Other OS (Not windows specific).

The ISO provided (mine was loaded onto a USB stick), offers both Legacy and BIOS UEFI supported installations.

I selected either (I had to try both) in my Boot menu as both the USB drive was shown twice, with and without the UEFI prefix, and it worked by installing a clean version onto the HDD. At no time did it ask for a Product Key, I did select to activate it automatically when online. Later I bought another SSD and Cloned this from the HDD using http://www.macrium.com/.

After testing all was fine, I plugged back my other SSD and HDD's, a quick install of EasyBCD gave me dual booting.

NOTE: When I had Win10 on a HDD, I ran EasyBCD on the Win7 pro SSD, so the boot menu would load faster, as windows 10 was very slow to load at that point. Since many updates the boot menu is now supplied by Win 10 Pro and is as good.
Worth stating, that my Win10 pro has been fully activated. This maybe due to signing up for the Insider programme earlier in the process, and maybe linked by some pre-allocation of a key?

teachermark said:

If (like you say) you have used the Windows Media creation tool to download the correct versions of Windows 10 for your computers then there IS an option to include the Windows key or 'Skip this step.' prior to the upgrade.

If you are doing a clean install, Windows will also invite you to use the number again after installation.
Again, you can pass on that option if you want to.

Cyberrufus is correct - it's not very easy to see, when you are installing the OS, but it IS there.

If all six of your computers are indeed activated then you don't (shouldn't) ever need the key that it came with.
(This applies to both OEM versions and retail purchases.)
Your license will automatically be transferred to Windows 10 when you upgrade. (UPGRADE, NOT CLEAN INSTALL)

Several people are wrong.
You can't use the Windows Media Creation tool to install the OS.
It's only purpose is to help you download the right version of Windows and the correct media for you to install it with (DVD or USB.)
For me, though, the USB option never worked.
I had to unpack the ISO onto the USB sticks!

You got that one right! I did try a direct online upgrade with the tool as well as having created the usb installation key and even burned a dvd but wasn't a good extraction of files from the combination 32/64bit iso file saved to the drive. The main problem I ran into as what to avoid outlined in the clean install guide that will easily effect any upgrade as well was having a pair of storage drives plugged in. W10 boot files and temp installation folders were later found and removed once the drives were pulled from the system and each placed in an external enclosure to retrieve files once 10 was on.

Besides the need for an 8gb or larger flash drive for the combination iso option where I used the MC tool I elected to use another 3rd party app to see the individual 32bit and 64bit stand alone iso downloads written to flash drives. That move proved to be reliable when working results came out of it.

The program used here will take the iso file and write to a flash drive or burn to media without the need to extract the files separately first. It has seen previous use with both 7 and the 8 Customer Preview for the usb keys. You likely used the wrong usb tool when trying to see the installation key made up. Of course you can extract all of the files and then use an ISO creator type program to see a new disk image made and then put on usb or burned to disk.