Upgrading Windows 8.1 to 10-Home to 10-Pro

Desired Outcome:
Upgrading Windows 8.1 to 10, on a VirtualBox VM on my Mac, because IBM Notes 10.0.1. (Admin client, etc) requires either Windows 7 or Windows 10.
Note: According to the Software Product Compatibility Report, it’s actually Windows 10-Pro.

Environment:
-Mac OS El Capitan (10.11.6) — Yes. I know I have to upgrade to Mojave…
-VirtualBox 5.2.28 on Mac. I think it’s up to 5.2.30 now.
-Windows 8.1. Installed on VM, licensed, activated

Actions:
-Within VirtualBox, made a clone – as a backup.

-Followed Instructions from ZDNet in this post for how to download Windows 10 and get it installed.

-During installation, I ran out of disk-space allocated within the VM. Backed out of the Windows Upgrade, when I figured I couldn’t free up enough space to continue.

-Within VirtualBox, I didn’t see a way where you can dynamically extend the amount of space given to the VM

-Found this Resize VirtualBox VDI file, which explains how to resize the VM space at the MacOS level.

-Took me a couple times to get the two command lines correctly entered – maybe I wasn’t typing exactly; wasn’t in correct directory; or something. Because the .VDI file was in a nested folder, which included folder names with space, I had to lookup how to address that — answer being to wrap with single apostrophe.

-VirtualBox Commands:
VBoxManage modifyhd –resize 35000 ‘/Users/PaulGarth/VirtualBox VMs/VATSIM-ATC/VATSIM-ATC.vdi’

In this command you can see I’m trying to resize the .VDI file to 35GB (up from current of 25GB). Note the use of the single apostrophe. After running the command there was a response of 0%, 10%… 100%

VBoxManage showhdinfo ‘/Users/PaulGarth/VirtualBox VMs/VATSIM-ATC/VATSIM-ATC.vdi’
Capacity: 35000 MBytes
Size on disk: 25529 Mbytes

In this command I’m just verifying that it worked. In the finder, the filesize looked the same, but the VirtualBox command showed success.

-Now I have to resize the partition within Windows. That’s somewhat easy by going into DiskManager; Right-Clicking on C: Drive; and extending with the unallocated space of 10GB.

-Upgrade to Windows 10
Now that I have adequate disk-space, I ran the installer again, and it went without a hitch.
Now I have Windows 10 Home; Version 1903; OS Build 18362145
Note: Nice, but not enough for IBM Notes

-Ran an application – Quicken for Windows
Appears to run OK. Just need to resolve some synching issues, but I think that’s within Quicken to WellsFargo, and not regarding the Window 10 OS.

Upgrade from Windows 10-Home to 10-Pro
-Requested a quote from vendor for the upgrade – MS-Windows 10 Pro Single Upgrade

Note: Currently, I have a VM with 64-bit MS-Windows 10 Home, version 1903 OS Build: 18362.145
According to the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center, there is Windows 10 Pro N, version 1903 (released May, 2019), which is the latest version of 10 Pro N, and doesn’t include stuff like Windows Media Player, Camera, Music, Movies and TV – that’s fine by me.

Memory requirements is 2GB RAM for 64-bit. This tells me that I may have to change the memory allocation for Windows. We’ll see.

-Logged into Microsoft and downloaded the software and the key

-I chose the “Download Manager” method vs. web-browser. Also chose Windows 10 Pro N, Version 1903, 64 Bit English — Size is 4604MB.
Note: First time, it didn’t appear to complete the download. It also asked to free up space by deleting the prior OS. What’s also weird is that I thought it would be running from a “Download Manager”, but I’m seeing it more from the web-browser. Download completed with size of 4,714,656 – that looks right for the second try.

-Ran the installer (Setup) — Note: I always like to do a “Save as” and place within a folder under c:\installers

-Chose Windows 10 Pro N

-Updating

-Everything appears OK, but I had to do an overinstall of an app (Quicken) to get it working again.

About Paul

CERT Coordinator, Ham Radio Operator, GTD Fan; Photographer; Domino/Notes Administrator
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