Windows 10: hope to upgrade to Win 10 Home 64 bit

Here is my situation, hopefully someone can advise:

I upgraded Win 7 32 bit to Win 10 Home 32 bit with no problems, been running it for a while. Now I want to do a clean install. However, my hardware supports 64 bit, so I hope to upgrade to Win 10 Home 64 bit, and from what I have read elsewhere that should be fine, it is allowed within the upgrade activation schema.

However, a friend just had me help with his machine doing something similar, and it ran into problems. We were using a USB with the GPT architecture for the install. During the upgrade it would not allow him to install to the primary partition, because it was MBR and not GPT. This is after we had already deleted the primary drive. We had to go into the command line and convert it to GPT from there, and then it would allow the install. My guess is that this is because his drive was partitioned, and we had only deleted one of them, as he was hoping to save the data on the other one.... It is possible if we had deleted both partitions it would have allowed us to install and done the conversion for us, as you suggest it does.... Doing it through the command prompt erased all partition data anyway and formatted the whole thing, but we didn't know that would happen when it started. In any case, when Win 10 was installed and up and running, it would not activate. It kept saying an invalid license number, or something like. (The previous version of Windows 10 had been activated). At that point my friend said not to worry, and he took the laptop and used alternative, probably less than legal methods to get it activated and running again. That is not something I have any interest in doing! It may or may not be important to know that he had never signed in to Windows 10 with a Microsoft account, only with a local account.

So, now I am about to attempt the same thing. I will be using a Win 10 Home 64 bit USB, made from the ISO downloaded from the Windows Media Creator and mounted on a USB using Rufus. (Obviously I have the option of if I want the install media to be UEFI-GPT or not). I have signed in to my current build of Windows 10 Home 32 bit with a Microsoft account instead of just a local account. I only have a single partition on my hard drive, and it is MBR and my system is a Legacy/BIOS boot, but I am pretty confident that it supports EUFI as well.

Since the current setup is Legacy I can use Rufus to create an MBR partition for BIOS or EUFI that uses Fat32, and my laptop *should* boot from that, and work...

Obviously there are benefits to converting to EUFI, though they aren't exorbitant. Is there any reason to believe that switching to EUFI and GPT will, like happened with my friend, make it impossible to activate my clean install? Would there be any benefit to using the method you published, Brink, about doing a clean install without doing an upgrade first?

I know Windows 10 prefers a EUFI environment, so it seems like a good idea to switch to that, if for no other reason than that one... But I don't have any install media that will allow me to reinstall Windows 7 to start the upgrade process over again, should everything go belly up and not activate.

Thoughts?

Also, as a secondary question: My other machine is currently running Windows 10 Home 64 bit (having upgraded from 8.1). Would it be possible for me to make an ISO of the Windows updates from this machine and then use that to install them on the new one, once I have completed the fresh install? I am currently living in India where the internet is not only limited but even my monthly high speed allotment is not exactly high speed. If I can use these already downloaded updates that would be incredible, saving a lot of time and resources. However I don't know if it would work or not, since they come from a different machine with a different activation.

And lastly, if there is a method for successfully accomplishing that sort of update: During the installation process it downloads quite a few updates and takes a long time. Could I turn my wifi off for the first phase of the process, and once Windows 10 has been mostly installed I turn it back on to allow me to sign in to my Microsoft account and activate the install, at which point using the ISO to do all of the updates instead of re-downloading them?

Thanks!

:)

 

Windows 7 64-bit upgrade to Windows 10 64-bit

The upgrade will do like for like:

Win 7 Home to Win 10 Home

Win 7 Pro to Win 10 Pro

Win 7 64 bit to Win 10 64 Bit...

 

win upgrade

i have win 10 home 32 bit 1 want upgrade to win 10 home 64 or 84 bit help me

 

I believe in the KISS principle, Keep It Simple, Stupid....

0.5 - First, run showkey from this forum and write down any previous OS keys that it finds for Windows 7, 8 or 8.1. Ignore the Windows 10 key it shows, that is just a generic product key not good for anything.
Showkey - Windows 10 Forums

1. You currently have an activated Windows 10, but no way to go back to Windows 7 without the install disks. So, first, make an image of the existing Operating System using Macrium Reflect Free. You'll need somewhere to put it like an external hard drive, second installed hard drive, make a separate partition on your installed hard drive or network shared location. Also, create the Macrium Reflect Free rescue disk. You'll need a separate USB flash drive or blank DVD for that. This step of making an image and rescue disk is a very highly recommended good idea, but it isn't 100% necessary.

2. I would not mess with converting the hard drive to a different booting method. What you have now is working just fine and meets all your needs right? Unless you have a need to change something, the tiny benefits you would receive from changing from MBR to GPT just are not worth it (in my opinion).

3. Make sure the Windows 10 install USB/Disk you made is the exact same version of Windows 10 that you are currently running. IE: pro, home, "N", single language.... just the 64bit version of it instead of 32bit.

4. Boot from the Windows 10 install USB/Disk, select custom install, delete all partitions on the hard drive except if you have made a partition to hold the backup, don't delete that one. Click on the unallocated space and let Windows install to that. When it asks for a product key, click the tiny text for "skip" or "do this later".

5. Keep your fingers crossed, and/or pray to your God that the new Windows 10 install activates like it is supposed to. I've done 3 clean installs an they have all activated.

 

I've got no idea about doing updates from an ISO created from the other system.

 

Thanks, especially for the back-up advice, which I hadn't even thought of.

While I agree that the benefits of GPT are not big enough to warrant the hassle of changing from MBR (the drive is not larger than 2 tb nor will it have more than four partitions, so the only real benefit is the slightly faster boot), the one thing you didn't touch on was whether Windows 10 would prefer to be in a UEFI environment instead of a Legacy/BIOS environment? Would there be any benefit to the actual functioning of Windows, save for boot time? (And also not counting the few security benefits like Secure Boot that UEFI offer).

If Windows would perform better in UEFI, and that performance difference would be noticeable, then it might be worth it, but that would necessitate the switch to GPT, right? Or can UEFI co-exist with MBR?

(Also, just a note - If I do switch to GPT then it does not do any good to save to a different partition, because when converting from MBR to GPT, at least from the command line, it has to run a "Clean" command on the disk, which erased all partition information and formats the entire disk into a single, un-allocated space. However I can just store any back-up materials on an external drive, but that is something you need to know before you start the process, which I did not know last time when my friend and I started, and hence we wiped all of his partitions and data in the process).

Edit/PS - I am almost entirely positive I had posted this question for advice in the thread that was a tutorial for clean installs of Windows 10 - Did a moderator move it from there? I suppose since I am switching from 32 bit to 64 bit it is a little different, but it still seemed like my questions had to do with the potential pitfalls of the clean install, so that seemed like the logical place to post it, where various users might see it and respond, instead of starting a new thread with a vague title...

 

Once the partition information is read by Windows 10 for the disk at boot up, there is no performance difference that I am aware of during operation. All that Windows 10 "cares about" after the initial discovery of the partitions is which file system is on each partition (NTFS, FAT32, etc.). Until such time as you want to mess with the partitions, of course.

My older laptop BIOS is UEFI capable in that it will boot from EFI files but it does not have the capability to boot from a GPT disk (but the second and/or removable hard drives can be GPT). So, whether or not the UEFI bios would require the boot disk to be of the GPT type is a matter of the bios itself. As far as I know, every UEFI bios should at least have the capability to boot an MBR disk for compatibility reasons.

 

Thanks, I suppose that answers to all of my thoughts and concerns. Keep it simple, and don't change what ain't broke, because none of the pay-offs are really worth the risks and effort.

 

Just a final post - it worked without a problem. I created a boot USB for Legacy systems, and once the install started no problems. Left WiFi on the whole time, logged in with my MS account during setup, and as soon as the desktop loaded the first thing I checked was activation, and it was all set. Thanks for the suggestions to stop over thinking things, NavyLCDR!