Has anyone used PDQ to "upgrade" Win10 LTSB to Full version?
We deployed a bunch of 1607 LTSB back in the beginning of our Win10 rollout and would now like to convert these to a "full" version of 10 while retaining settings and installed programs. After some testing and research it appears this process is fairly easy to accomplish by mounting a Win10 ISO and running "setup.exe /pkey NPPR9-FWDCX-D2C8J-H872K-2YT43" (no this is not a secret key I gave away its the KMS client key posted on the MS site).
While the process can take 1-3 hours depending on how slow a system is it has worked for us every time and I'm looking for a way to do this through PDQ. I saw one post that seemed useful but I lost track of it. I did look at some of the upgrade posts as well but most seem more involved than this needs to be.
Any thoughts?
-
If you look here:
https://help.pdq.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360050792172-Use-PDQ-Deploy-to-push-In-Place-Windows-10-Upgrade?page=2#comments
I posted the XML export of the procedure I'm using successfully. You can import it and modify it to suit your needs. -
It's a starting point you can test with and see if it helps you. A few years back, I used PDQ to perform hundreds of in-place upgrades from Windows 7 to 10 without issue.
As far as importing, I didn't post the XML as an attachment or code block. Just copy/paste it into an XML file and import it.
-
Were you ever able to get this working? I have some 2016 LTSB machines that I need to update. I have successfully done it manually, but I am looking to do it remotely as the machine is in a secure location that I do not always have access to. Additionally, during my manual process of performing the in-place upgrade (2016 LTSB to 20H2) I had to run it with a switch so I could define the KMS product key.
-
So yes and no. I do have it working but as far as i can tell if you want to upgrade from LTSB or LTSC and keep all programs and files it will require a manual step. The /PKEY parameter which is required to do this does not allow you to silently accept the EULA and switching to the parameters that does allow this specifically tells you it won't keep your programs because your upgrading to a new version. So what I did was setup a process to pull the files to a share on the machine and run the upgrade as the logged in user. I login as the local admin and click ok twice and it does everything else. Unfortunately it does still report failure (even with a 3 hour timeout window/pause and it finishes in an hour) and I have not figured that part out yet because its 90% working I have not looked too hard. At some point I'd like to so I can do some cleanup afterwards. I can be more specific if you want the details.
If anyone has any idea how to resolve my "fail" I'm interested. The only error I get is this. The log folder for the upgrade is empty since it does not fail the actual upgrade. The error does not show up for quite awhile after the upgrade starts. I guess 57minutes and 6 seconds in this case :) Apparently this error means "The system cannot open the file" and I found some references to the process being unexpectedly logged off. Since this obviously happens during an upgrade reboot I'm not sure how to fix it.
The command I use is
c:\21H1Upgrade\setup.exe /pkey NPPR9-FWDCX-D2C8J-H872K-2YT43 /showoobe none /Compat IgnoreWarning /DynamicUpdate Disable /Telemetry Disable /MigrateDrivers All /copylogs C:\20H2UpdateLogsThe key is a standard published KMS key.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
5 comments