I installed a 180 Day Trial Edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
Standard Edition in Sept 2011 on a 64bit Windows 2008 R2 Server in a
HyperV VM. In the long procurment process, the 180 day trial expired
a few days prior to finally receiveing my purchased copy. I first
attempted to perform an Edition upgrade. It said it completed the
upgrade however the services will still not start. Ir got an error in
the event logs indicating that I still have a trial edition that is
expired. I have tryed completly removing the sql server and
reinstalling, even completly uninstalling and removing all files and
registry hive under software Microsoft SQL server. adn I still get the
same error. " Evaluation period has expired For mor infomation on how
to upgrade your evaluation software please go to http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy"
I have tried the Option 2 in KB971268 to change a reg key from 1 to 3,
and reattempt the edition upgrade, all with the same result.

Any bright ideas out there on how to correct this?

DaveT (dave (AT) tersigni (DOT) net) writes:
This may be difficult to assist with over a newsgroup. It's not that
I upgrade from Evaluation to Standard everyday.

One thing to check is how many instances you currently have installed.
Open SQL Server Configuration and sort on the Name column to see how many SQL Server services you have.

Else, the best bet might be to open a case with Microsoft support,
although it's possible that when you tell them that you have nuked
things in the registry, that you need to reinstall Windows.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel (AT) sommarskog (DOT) se

Links for SQL Server Books Online:
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SQL 2005: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb895970.aspx