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Windows 10 Education Upgrade Key Not Working

Anonymous
2020-09-16T21:57:48+00:00

Hi there...I have Windows 10 Home on my laptop, and just became a part time student (again). I received a Key to upgrade my Home edition to Educational, but at the "Enter a product key" prompt to "Change product key," I'm getting an error stating that the product key I've entered doesn't work, with error 0x800f0805. Tech support at the school says the key should be valid.

Any ideas what to do?

Thanks in advance!

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Licensing and activation

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Anonymous
2020-09-17T17:52:49+00:00

It appears you will need to boot from the install media to perform the Education install. There, you should be prompted to select the edition and provide a product key. Note, this will write over the existing partition so backup all your personal data.

Alternatively, you can try to do an inline upgrade using Rufus which allows you to select the Education edition. See this guide: https://pureinfotech.com/download-windows-10-19.... Note, in step 15, you want to ignore the version and use the most recent instead.

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-09-17T20:40:59+00:00

    Awesome. Thank you again. It'll take me a couple days to get ready to attempt this, but I'll be sure to report back when I have. I really appreciate your kindness!

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-09-17T17:19:53+00:00

    HI, WIlliamDz...thank you so much for the help. I'm still having issues. Going to the Education website you provided (which I found on my own, too) didn't offer any other version than Home. I downloaded the installer from that page, but it was the same installer you linked to before, and it never asks for a product Key. I went through the process of downloading and burning the .iso, but before the installation starts, the installer confirms that I'm installing Windows 10 Home with no option to enter a Key or change the edition being installed.

    I also tried "change product key" again, and this time it went through most of the process, showing "Preparing for upgrade" (after accepting my key), but then after it worked for a bit it came back with an error like, "Failed error checking, please retry key in a little while" (not exact words). Inputting my key in there again came back with the same error I reported above.

    Any other ideas? Maybe it's not a big deal to install Educational over Home, I don't know. It's apparent, though, that my school cannot give me another key, and all they came back with for support was showing me 5 different ways to change the product key for my current installation, none of which game me any different errors than the first one.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-09-17T14:53:15+00:00

    Someone pointed out to me you will need to get Education version from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-downlo...

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-09-16T22:05:37+00:00

    Hi and thanks for reaching out. My name is William. I'm a Windows technical expert. I'll be happy to help you out today.

    You are encountering this issue because you are trying to apply this key to Windows Home edition, not Windows Education edition. To correct this, you will need to do upgrade or fresh install of Windows 10 Education. To do that, see this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-downlo.... When you have finished prepping the media, open it and run setup.exe. Alternatively, you can boot from the boot media you created an install Windows 10 as a fresh install. Note, the latter option will not migrate your personal files or programs so backup any important data before doing this (which you should do in either case).

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