Sql-server – Migrate from Windows to Linux

Well, if you're only concerned with how to get around this partitioning issue you have, and are sure you won't face performance issues after you move to a single partition, then you could try to collapse all of your partitions into 1, and there's lots of ways to do.

If you feel your system can handle it, you could dump all the data into another table and give it a max ID number to dump into. Then when the bulk of the data is copied into there, you could note the ID, find any new records that came in. If it's a huge amount of records, dump those new records in the new table as well. After the 2nd dump you should be almost caught up. At that point you do not allow new data to come in for a few seconds/minutes while you run pre-scripted out commands to:

-move the remaining data into the new table that doesn't have partitioning enabled after making sure the schemas match.

-rename the old table. Make sure you don't have blocking issues.

-rename the new table to the old table.

You might want to avoid adding indexes at the beginning, and do those at the very end.

If doing this on the live system isn't an option, you could move the data to another system and do all these steps there.

Perhaps you could use this opportunity to archive your old data. You could consider creating a view and have your old data in a different archive read only database and have it referenced with a view.

How much data is it anyways, with and without indexes?

You've already I assume, applied the registry fix suggested by Microsoft.

Since they are saying that this has been resolved since SP1, have you considered installing a newer version of SQL Server 2008 R2 Express?

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26729

Update 12:27

Based on what you're saying and without having your system in front of me, I'd try to find out if the evaluation edition you think you removed might actually still be there.

You can run the SQL Server features discovery report to find out what components are actually installed on your laptop.

Start -> All Programs -> SQL Server 2008 -> Configuration Tools -> SQL Server Installation Center. Then on the left you select Tools, and then click on the Installed SQL Server features discovery report.

Installation Center - Tools

Features Report

I would also go Control Panel, Uninstall Programs, and make sure there wasn't anything left over from the evaluation edition. Once you're absolutely sure that evaluation is gone, reboot the system just to make sure that the registry is reloaded correctly.