Upgrade to 10 from 7 goes in circles

I formatted a old laptop HDD and put W10 on it using their media creation tool downloaded onto a USB. It worked fine except that I installed W10 pro and not W10 Home and it would not let me activate the new W10 because you have to upgrade compatible versions. It knew I had W7 home from my W7 product key.

So I reformatted the HDD and tried again but this time I end up at the message:

'The computer started using the windows installation media. Remove the installation media and restart your computer so that Windows starts normally. Then, insert the installation media and restart the upgrade. [Do not select | Custom [advanced]| to perform an upgrade'

That doesnt work whatever you do or choices you make you end up with that message.

I'm using a Samsung RV510 laptop. I used the 'quick' format option both times.

Any ideas?

ICIT2LOL said:

Hello UK mate why don't you just clean the drive and install from an ISO disk? I personally always clean or clean all a drive before installing anything because I don't feel a straight format is quite enough - I stand to be corrected of course.

Now you then activate the 10 using that generic code and when done use the 7 key to activate it proper. If the 7 is Home all you will get is Home although having said that one of my desktops got Pro even though it was Home.

Now when I did this on my Pro laptop all I got was Home because the machine was a downgrade form 8 to 7 Pro and I just called Microsoft and asked them direct - make sure you get the genuine Microsoft site and not that logmein123 one and explain your situation.

I prsisted with Pro simply because I paid for the 7 Pro but I think the home version is not so bad.

Doing it my way does away with any nonsense (I feel) with upgrading.

Thanks pal. I would have followed your suggestion if I hadnt come across an even easier one. Just delete the partition and allocate the freed up space to the new one. It worked.

Was going to post it here for others with the same problem.

Cheers for you help.