How to upgrade 1511 from Home to Pro?

Dear Charles,

I have my friend use this method to upgrade to Pro version. He already changed the key and made a decision not to upgrade anymore. How do he re-use the Windows 10 Home key? Thank you very much!

Regards,

Hoc Nguyen Triet from Vietnam

Anytime your friend wants to Clean Install Windows 10 Upgrade it should reactivate if it had already activated after Upgrade. 

However if he  has Home Version then Pro will not activate without a Pro version Product key or Digital Entitlement.  Do not use the workaround to change the version to Pro unless there is a valid Pro version Product Key or Digitial Entitlement to back it up, as it will not activate!

The issue in this thread was V.1511 hiding versions and if detecting embedded Key only offering that version to try to prevent users from installing the wrong one.  This issue is corrected by always showing the menu to choose Pro or Home, regardless if there is embedded or any Entitlement.  Once installed it sorts if you are Entitled. 

If only I'd stumbled across this thread a couple of days ago it would have saved me considerable headaches (I've always said if 1 person has a particular computer problem then hundreds more do also).  I was fortunate in that another MVP, Andre Da Costa, got me off of "high center" but it sure took some doing.  However, I still have an important question that could have saved me a lot of grief; you mentioned that the new MCT installer now gives you a choice of Home or Pro but that most definitely wasn't the case with me and I downloaded the latest MCT twice and used it to create a flash drive version twice, just to be sure that I didn't miss something the 1st time around -  it never displayed a menu nor gave me a choice, but rather just read the embedded key and kept on installing the Home Edition.  Keep in mind that this was after a previous successful upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, which was activated and had been on the computer for around 6 weeks.  My post below is rather lengthy but it raises a scenario that's a little different than the ones discussed here, but also one that's bound to occur again in the future.  Please comment after reading it as to what MS has done to prevent such a thing from occurring again and why you think I was never offered a menu choice of the 2 versions of Win 10 as well as why the previous legitimate upgrade of Win 10 Pro had not been duly stored in Microsoft's database so that the clean re-install of Win 10 Pro would have been done successfully the 1st time around.      Thanks in advance.

I can't be the only one this has happened to but neither have I been able to find a concrete answer on how to fix this problem.

Have a fairly new Dell computer which came with Windows 8.1 Home that was upgraded to Professional via a "Pro Pack".  Recently the unit was upgraded to Windows 10 Pro (via the standard MS Internet update process where the files were downloaded to the computer & used to upgrade it) with no problem; verified that it was running Win 10 Pro.  However, due to a terrible problem that was brought on by a subsequent-but-unknown defective Windows update the printing function in Edge, Maps and Photos (all built-in Metro apps) was destroyed, making it impossible to print out of these 3 programs (which has been extensively documented in many postings in other Forums elsewhere).  Microsoft tech support never came up with a fix, thereby necessitating a clean (bare-metal) re-install in order to restore the printing functions in the afore-mentioned three programs.  For this I used a flash drive (created by the MS Media Creation Tool) which had Windows 10 Professional on it (the latest version 1511) which I had used for 2 other different installs / re-installs (to computers which had Win 10 Pro on them previously) and had no issues whatsoever with the correct Win 10 Pro version being installed and retained.  Supposedly MS takes some kind of "snapshot" of your system, with the latest, most recent version of Win 10 which was on the hard drive and records it permanently in their database so no matter how many times you might need to reload Windows 10 it will always default to the correct version, in this case Professional - only in this case it didn't work and it installed Home Edition instead.  I caught it pretty early on, wiped the hard drive and tried another install, but to no avail; it once again installed Win 10 Home instead of Pro.  Anyway, I had to go on and finish up the job as the unit was scheduled to go back online the next day but I now need to know how to "unlock" the Professional version which it had on there to begin with; the computer is certainly entitled to it seeing as how it had Win 10 Pro on it before; paying for it again is out of the question, of course.  My guess is that somehow the reinstall mechanism thought that because the OEM version was originally Home Edition, it read some hard-coded message on the BIOS and put it (Home Edition) back on there, even though:

1. It had been previously upgraded to Pro back when it had Win 8.1 on it and then later clearly had Win 10 Pro after the upgrade, and
2. The "snapshot" that was sent back to the MS database should have permanently recorded that it had Win 10 Pro installed on it, from now till Doomsday.

Please advise as to how to handle this crazy scenario and unlock the Pro version of Windows, which I am rightly entitled to.  (And please don't suggest a rollback / reinstall of Windows 8.1 Pro; there's no time for that and the 8.1 Pro Pack upgrade key is probably long-gone by now anyway).  Thanks and standing by...

The solution is marked the Answer of this thread you're posting in:  You must insert in Activation settings the default Pro Product Key VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T.  This will only change Home version to Pro, then shortly after connecting to the internet it should activate with the Digital Entitlement already assigned to that PC in MS Activation servers. 

I am sorry you are put through this.  Myself and several other MVP's tried to convince WIndows 10 developers that this would greatly inconvenience consumers, but they would not return the version menu to the installation media  because some consumers chose the wrong version.  So this workaround which we originally thought would be temporary has indeed apparently become permanent.

I appreciate your response. I must not have been entirely clear though; Andre did indeed provide me with the product key you mentioned and as soon as I entered it Windows (curiously) went through the same Home-to-Pro upgrade process, just as if I'd utilized a Pro Pack. After all the usual gyrations and various reboots when it finally came back up it was back to Windows 10 Pro and it immediately activated (re-activated, actually) when it connected with the Internet.  But what a nightmare to be put through, not to mention how is one supposed to know all these arcane machinations that you have to go through to get back to where you had already been before?  As I think I mentioned, I've done several other clean installs on previously-upgraded Dells identical to this one and have never encountered this particular problem; as far as I recall Win 10 Pro was installed without a hitch and immediately re-activated itself.

However, it's obvious that many people will fall victim to this same scenario and many, if not most, will have no idea how to visit these Forums, much-less how to solve the problem.  I hope you can use my (and the many others you've encountered) case studies to convince Microsoft that "it wasn't broken so don't fix it", unless they can come up with another solution to the OEM embedded product keys.  And in Dell's particular case they don't even offer Win 10 Pro on a lot of their machines and the ones they do are only available in 64-bit versions; in my case I have a unique requirement for 32-bit Windows which even adds a greater challenge to it since it's near-impossible to "downgrade" from 64 to 32 bits.  Please keep hammering them to either go back to the way it was or build-in some better sensing technology to allow a person to override the OS's initial guess as to what version should be installed.  Or make it where the installer will check-in with the Windows Store (database) to verify what the computer's most recent installed version of the OS was and then re-install that particular version, overriding whatever may be hard-coded into the BIOS.  I can guarantee that this is will be a continuing problem that isn't going away anytime soon.  Please keep us posted out here as to what the Brain Trust in Redmond is up to as regards this issue, okay?