Forum Discussion
Windows Pro, BIOS, licensing
I have a business PC that's on Windows 10 Pro. We are putting a new NVMe drive into it and want to put Win 11 Pro onto it. No matter what we do Win 11 won't give the choice to put Pro onto it then activate the Pro key. Thought we'd be clever and put a fresh copy of Win 10 Pro onto it then upgrade to Win 11 Pro. Same deal. The Win 10 ISO no longer gives us the option to choose versions. Instead it simply throws and activated Home version onto it. We put the Pro key that we extracted from the working Win 10 Pro NVMe drive but it never switches to Win 10 Pro on the new NVMe drive.
How do we get around this? I haven't found anything that works.
2 Replies
The answer to this was to install Windows 10 Pro fresh then upgrade to Windows 11 Pro. However, the Windows 10 install USB had to be edited to include the ei.cfg file in the sources directory. This forced Win 10 to show options and ignore the key that was stuck in the BIOS and allowed us to re-install our Pro key. Then the upgrade to Win 11 was executed.
Ultimately the answer to this was to force a Windows 10 Pro install the the ei.cfg file set to force the question. Then upgrade the PC to Win 11 Pro. I tried to add that file to the Win 11 install but it ignored the file and continued to try to install Win 11 Home.
