Dammit! I did it again. My preview trial of 2025 was evaluation version, and if you let that run past 180 days your SQL instance just will not start. I had an old Azure VM that I fired up to grab some code from a SQL Agent job I had been playing with and hit exactly this problem. Here’s the workaround:

1. Disable the Windows Time Service. This is harder than you’d think, and by itself didn’t work, but for the record here’s what I had to do. Open an elevated Powershell prompt and run “Stop-Service W32Time”. You can’t do this from services, it won’t let you.
2. Disable the Hyper V Time Synchronisation Service. This is easier – open services.msc, find the service and right click and stop. You can dsable for good measure if you like.
3. click on your system clock and choose “Date and Time Settings”. Disable time synchronisation and then reset the time to whatever date you want or can remember being during the evaluation period.
4. Now start SQL – you shouldn’t get the evaluation prompt message and SQL should start.
5. However you don’t want to keep playing this game every time you need to start SQL. Through rigorous testing I have found that setting my VM clock back 2 years does not seem to roll back prices by 2 years at the supermarket. So we need to move onto the next step which is fixing the problem for good.
6. Grab a valid install media. This can be any SQL 2025 install media. Open the media and choose to upgrade from an earlier version of SQL in the install options. So long as SQL has started you should be able to upgrade to a different Edition.
7. Now turn those time sync services back on and set the time back to the present(or watch as they magically do it themselves. You’ll probably want a restart for good measure.

Oddly, the Edition Upgrade option on the install media was not helpful which is why I updated from the Version option, but to be fair I tried that before I started messing with system clock settings. YMMV.

Side Note: The code I was looking for wasn’t on that server. Another reminder to myself about source control – even for my messing around bits and pieces.