Upgraded from W7 Pro, and got W10 Home...

Hi all,

Done a fair bit of searching and my problem seems to be fairly unique. Long story short, I had W10 Home installed, formatted and installed an unused copy of W7 Pro, used the W10 Upgrade Assistant to upgrade to W10 again expecting to then have W10 Pro, but it still says I have W10 Home. What gives?

I bought my current laptop about a year ago, and it came with W10 Home pre-installed. This week I came across an unused licence for W7 Pro, and thought I would use it to upgrade my W10 Home installation to Pro. On my previous laptop I had W7 Pro, which then upgraded to W10 Pro.

Just using the key to upgrade didn't work, as the key is OEM. I formatted the laptop and installed W7 Pro on it, and registered it online. I had to turn UEFI off to get W7 to install. I then downloaded the MS Upgrade Assistant through the assistive technologies upgrade program. I left the installation process overnight, and woke up to an error. Clicked 'try again' and W10 installed. I signed into my MS account during the install process. I know that account was linked to my W10 Home licence. Now, when I look at the laptop specs it still says I have W10 Home. I tried turning UEFI on in the BIOS, but then the laptop says it can't find any of the boot devices. I now need to have it turned off to boot W10 Home.

As windows is activated using a digital licence, its more than likely reactivated the current licence windows holds for the unit. Only way to change this is to upgrade the Home to Pro using a product pal.

And hope the Windows 7 Pro product key is not blocked from online activation. If it is, it will not activate Windows 10 and you have to go back to Windows 7 Pro, activate it, and do a proper upgrade to Windows 10.

Something was done incorrectly during the first upgrade because a proper upgrade of Windows 7 Pro will never go back down to Home version. Without messing around in the registry, going from Pro to Home requires a clean install.

OK thanks all, I will try that this afternoon. Does UEFI being enabled or disabled make a difference? Also, my USB was formatted to NTFS and not Fat32. Would that cause an issue?

Installing is quick, so it's no problem to reinstall 7 Pro and go up again.

UPDATE: OK, I now have W10 Pro licensed and activated! Thank you very much.

I want to now do a fresh install so I'll try the media creation tool and turn UEFI back on.

GlobalSaffer said:

OK thanks all, I will try that this afternoon. Does UEFI being enabled or disabled make a difference? Also, my USB was formatted to NTFS and not Fat32. Would that cause an issue?

Installing is quick, so it's no problem to reinstall 7 Pro and go up again.

UPDATE: OK, I now have W10 Pro licensed and activated! Thank you very much.

I want to now do a fresh install so I'll try the media creation tool and turn UEFI back on.

Glad to hear it worked for you! The USB flash drive needs to be FAT32 formatted to boot on most UEFI computers. If you let Microsoft's Media Creation Tool make the flash drive for you, it will format it as FAT32.

Also note, if the computer has a product key stored in UEFI firmware for Windows 10 (or 8/8.1) Home - that is what a clean install will automatically install. You can override it with a PID.txt file in the sources folder with the Windows 10 Pro generic product key provided in an earlier post - or you can just upgrade the Home installation to Pro by changing the product key again.

pid.txt:

[PID]
Value=VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T

NavyLCDR said:

Glad to hear it worked for you! The USB flash drive needs to be FAT32 formatted to boot on most UEFI computers. If you let Microsoft's Media Creation Tool make the flash drive for you, it will format it as FAT32.

Also note, if the computer has a product key stored in UEFI firmware for Windows 10 (or 8/8.1) Home - that is what a clean install will automatically install. You can override it with a PID.txt file in the sources folder with the Windows 10 Pro generic product key provided in an earlier post - or you can just upgrade the Home installation to Pro by changing the product key again.

pid.txt:

[PID]
Value=VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T

Thank you for the info! Everything seems to be running smoothly now.