Windows 10 Pro ISO

[jack-ant]

I had an activated Windows 10 Pro laptop upgraded from a Windows 8/7 Pro license. Using the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool I created a 64 bit Windows 10 installation DVD. An SSD has been freshly installed into the laptop. Although it may have done in the past the media creation tool has no hard 'Pro' option. From my experience the DVD installs Home edition and fails to active. The Windows 10 Pro 'key' can be retrieved from the previous HDD and you can enter it when 'upgrading' to PRO in the Windows store. This worked great although it wasn't elegant.

Now I have the same situation with another laptop however the HDD is inaccessible due to failure so I have no way of getting the key.

Research brought up this article and guide which suggest microsoft have taken away the option. It appears from some comments on the article and from attempting this myself that this solution of editing the ei.cfg file no longer works, although i'm not 100% sure.

I'd like to avoid downloading the pro iso from torrent sites or websites hosting the pro version because of trust issue.

I have a feeling though that I may be missing something simple?

 

[Porthos]

If home installed just go to enter new product key and enter the Pro generic key, After it upgrades to pro it will see the digital license on MS's servers
VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T

Easy as that.

 

[jack-ant]

Thank you, that saved the day!

 

[johnrobert]

That happened to me

I installed Win 10 home on a machine that was previously pro

Put in Windows 7 pro key that was on case and it upgraded to pro

 

[ohio_grad_06]

I've had some systems where they'd been previously upgraded and when it installed, it installed Windows 10 Home Edition. On those, even using the correct product key didn't work. What I had to do was to tell it to upgrade using the product key they showed above. On the ones I did though, If memory serves, they still did not show up as activated, but once it had upgraded to Windows 10 pro with the generic key, I was able to tell it to change the product key to the proper version and it worked fine. It would be nice if they allowed you to pick what version you wanted to install for cases like this. However, I can see why they do it this way. If you had end users trying to fix their own pc, they may not be sure which options to pick and this would eliminate some confusion.