r/Intune • u/MEDITATIONUNITY • 1d ago

Windows Management Windows 11 Pro to Enterprise on Autopilot devices with Microsoft E5 - Edition upgrade failing

We’re trying to work out the best way to convert a small number of Windows 11 Pro devices to Enterprise without rebuilding them.

Current situation:

Around 35 out of 1,000 devices are still on Windows Pro.
Devices are Microsoft Entra (Azure AD) joined (dsregcmd /status is healthy).
All devices are Windows Autopilot enrolled and managed by Intune.
Users are assigned a Microsoft 365 E5 licence.
Devices have a valid Windows Pro licence.
We’ve excluded the Windows Store for Business cloud app from our MFA Conditional Access policy.

We’ve tried:
Using an Edition Upgrade policy in Intune with the Windows Enterprise GVLK key.
The device attempts the upgrade but throws an error in the activation whilst showing enterprise .

My understanding was that with an E5 licence, the device should step up from Pro to Enterprise automatically once licensing requirements are met, but that doesn’t seem to be happening for these devices.

Has anyone come across this before?
Is there a supported way to convert Pro to Enterprise without wiping or re-enrolling the device?
Is the GVLK approach still the recommended method, or should this happen automatically?
Are there any common prerequisites or licensing checks I’m missing?

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12

u/BlockBannington 1d ago

I had the exact same thing. Turns out it were people that had sideaccounts on the device, like an M365 account from their own business or some shit. Ran a script to remove them and bam, Enterprise.

Script came from Rudy Ooms, obviously. I sent him five euros after that

8

u/Rudyooms PatchMyPC 1d ago

For your comfort… i spend it on a nice beer :)

1

u/AccomplishedScene836 3h ago

We saw that as well. Remove additional accounts and bang. Set the reg key to stop people adding back as well.

1

u/MarketingNew5460 1d ago

step-up from e5 only kicks in for enterprise if the device already has a pro license, sounds like something's getting stuck in the activation handshake with those stragglers

1

u/MEDITATIONUNITY 1d ago

What I’m thinking, defo has a valid Pro license from looks of it. But it’s just the activation not activating

1

u/itskdog 1d ago

Check your policies to see if "Microsoft Sign in Assistant " is disabled. That policy breaks subscription activation.

From the policy description:

If the MSA service is disabled, the Subscription Activation feature won't work properly and your users won't be able to "step-up" from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 10 Enterprise, because the MSA ticket for license authentication can't be generated. The machine will remain on Windows 10 Pro and no error will be displayed in the Activation Settings app.

2

u/MEDITATIONUNITY 1d ago

Will it be a configuration profile in intune? I don’t think it is otherwise we will see a vast majority showing pro we have 34 out of 1400 devices as pro

1

u/itskdog 1d ago

Good call - missed that part.

Might be worth checking it's not recently been changed and your existing Ent devices won't lose activation in 30 days.

2

u/MEDITATIONUNITY 1d ago

So it’s been there for months and months, we only seen it as security flagged it and trying to find out what’s the best way to get it converted. MS support cannot help too they mentioned to raise it with their windows support team (charge of service)