Solved Windows 7 - upgrade from Home Premium to Professional

[Gorlash]

I'm preparing to do this, but I'm nervous... will I even be able to activate Windows 7 Professional after the install?? I don't know what parts of this will still work.

I noticed that I cannot run Windows Update on Win 7 Home Premium any more; it displays an error message saying update could not run, I need to reboot my machine, but rebooting doesn't fix anything. So I'm wondering where I will be if I try to do any upgrade at this point...

 

[Megahertz07]

To upgrade from Home Premium to Professional you need a valid Professional license key.
M$ doesn't sell any kind of Win 7 for years and I don't think you will find any reliable for sale.
DON'T BUY a license key on ebay. The chances are you will loose money.

The questions are:
- Do you have a valid Professional license key?
- Why do you want or need a Professional version?

 

[Volume Z]

it displays an error message saying update could not run, I need to reboot my machine

Tried this?

Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service - Microsoft Community

 

[Gorlash]

Tried this?

Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service - Microsoft Community

Ahhh... cool ... So Windows Modules Installer was set to Manual, and when I reset it to Automatic and rebooted, it changed back to Manual. Anyway, I changed it back to Automatic and started it, and now Windows is out checking for updates now...

I also note that the last date when Updates were installed is 11/14/17 !! Yikes...
So it might take it awhile...

 

[Gorlash]

Anyway, I want to upgrade to Win 7 Pro because I installed 32GB of RAM in my system, but Home Premium will only use 16GB, and there doesn't appear to be any way to change that. The reasons *why* I want 32GB available don't really matter, but I *do* want it, and I already have it installed. So an upgrade to Win 7 Pro would allow me to access that.

I *have* ordered the upgrade from Ebay; I'll have to hope that their key is actually valid; they have very high rating on Ebay.

 

[Gorlash]

So anyway, returning to the original question, if I *do* upgrade to Win 7 Pro, and assuming the license key is valid, should I expect any other issues? Will activation in fact work??

 

[SIW2]

Strange question. Why do you ask?

 

[Gorlash]

Strange question. Why do you ask?

Well, partially because of my preceding problem with getting Windows Updates to work; I was afraid that MS was blocking any updates to Win7, and that might have included activation. Now I realize that this is a non-issue. So maybe I don't have to worry about it.

I *was* hoping that one or more people here might have actually activated Windows since the EOL was reached, but I realize that it's been less than a month now.

 

[SIW2]

Windows 7 will activate. Even vista still does.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
As long as the activation key is valid 7 will activate.

 

[torchwood]

hi
once you get the key run the tool from this link, copy/paste the output.


Windows Genuine and Activation Issue Posting Instructions


Roy

 

[AddRAM]

Windows 7 no longer has updates, finished, finito, the end, done

Now you can enjoy W7 update free

 

[erpster4]

Windows 7 no longer has updates, finished, finito, the end, done

Now you can enjoy W7 update free

not entirely true, AddRAM.

MS did release some new W7 updates for free last Friday Feb. 7 after EOL (KB4539601 & KB4539602) to fix the wallpaper problems that were caused by the Jan. 2020 updates (KB4534310 & KB4534314)

 

[Bree]

...and Defender definitions will continue until 2023.

 

[Gorlash]

Well, this was simply a fantastic experience!!

First, I wanted to try upgrading to Win7 Professional, but in case something went wrong, I wanted an easy fall-back to my current working system. So I decided to get a new disk drive, and clone the system from my old drive to the new one... that way, if anything went wrong, I still had my old working drive.

I decided to take the opportunity, as well, to upgrade my boot drive to an SSD, so I got an inexpensive 2TB SSD (Crucial BX500)... not the fastest drive around, but modest. Sadly, my old motherboard cannot boot to M.2, so this is a SATA 3 drive - but benchmarks show that it is about 3X the speed of my old WD HD. I used AOMEI Backupper to clone the drive; it is a robust, reliable program that I've used before for this purpose... and it worked perfectly - and I was *stunned* by the difference in boot time!!! WOW!! I used to sit and read a book while my computer booted, but now I get the desktop in about 20 seconds, though it takes a couple more minutes for all my crap to load...

ITM, I went on Ebay and purchased an unopened copy of Windows Anytime Upgrade, $14 after shipping, and guaranteed free return if anything went wrong... but nothing did. The new key worked fine, and Microsoft happily uploaded all the new software to upgrade me to Windows 7 Professional, and everything works beautifully!!

So now I have a blazing new machine, with 32GB RAM, and everything runs perfectly...

As they might say on icanhascheezburger.com... I has a purr...

 

[TechnoMage2016]

Did you run MSCONFIG, and change that nasty 30 sec. boot delay, to 3 sec.?
That can speed up your boot by 27 sec's anyway.


There's a bunch of other speed up tweaks, but that's too much for this thread.

 

[Gorlash]

Did you run MSCONFIG, and change that nasty 30 sec. boot delay, to 3 sec.?
That can speed up your boot by 27 sec's anyway.

Well... *that* was certainly a disaster!!
I ran MSCONFIG, but it opened on the General tab, with 'Selective Start' selected !!
I obviously didn't want that, so I clicked on 'Normal start' and hit Apply...
I then went to the Boot tab and changed the startup time from 30 to 10 seconds, and hit Apply.

I closed MSCONFIG and rebooted, and now boot fails with:
status: 0xc000000e
the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

I of course do not have a Win 7 Professional setup disk.

I tried booting to a Win7 Ultimate setup disk, and ran the 'Repair your computer' option, but unfortunately it doesn't show any existing OS partitions on the disk...

Is there any I can recover from this, other than completely formatting and re-creating the installation?

Fortunately, I still have the old Win7 Home Premium disk, which is what I'm running with now...

 

[SIW2]

This is what mine shows

 

[SIW2]

I of course do not have a Win 7 Professional setup disk.

I tried booting to a Win7 Ultimate setup disk,

Fortunately, I still have the old Win7 Home Premium disk

They are the same apart from one little text file in the sources folder called ei.cfg, which can be deleted, resulting in media that allows a choice of all editions. Like this:

Is there any I can recover from this, other than completely formatting and re-creating the installation?

Do you have restore point or a system image?

 

[SIW2]

If you have a win7 dvd/iso file which includes SP1, you can easily change it to all editions media.

You can't delete the sources\ei.cfg file directly from a dvd, so create an iso from the dvd using something like gburner ( which is a fully functional trial for 30 days). Then delete the ei.cfg from the new iso. Then burn the new iso to dvd/bootable usb stick.