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I am expecting to receive a new Windows 11 Home laptop that I would like to join to a company Azure Active Directory, and log in with a corporate account.

I understand that Windows 11 Home does not support Azure AD join, but I have a Windows 11 Pro key available.

I know that I can sign in with a personal Microsoft account (or create a local account), upgrade windows, join the device to AD and then switch to logging in with a corporate account. I would like to know:

Is it possible to achieve the same without needing to sign-in with a non-corporate account or create a new local account?

In the OOBE, you can press SHIFT-F10 to open a console. I believe that Changepk.exe can be used to upgrade from Home to Pro given the right key. Will this work from the command line in the OOBE? It would save a lot of faff with unnecessary local accounts.

DaveF
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1 Answers1

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Your plan works fine, essential do this:

  1. Choose language, keyboard layout, device name etc.

  2. Once you hit the login screen, press F10 to open CMD. Technically you can open CMD while it's installing Updates but I don't recommend this because it will restart without warning and might interrupt the following process.

  3. Run slui.exe /upk. This is not always necessary but I suspect sometimes the Home license will be installed and needs to be removed first. Doesn't hurt to do anyway.

  4. Run changepk.exe /ProductKey <Your product Key> It will say it failed but ignore it.

  5. Restart

  6. It's now Windows 11 Pro.

I installed Windows 11 Home into a Virtual Machine and tested this using the Generic Keys from this website, this is what I found to get to the steps above:

  • Running changepk.exe /ProductKey VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T (Key for Windows 11 Pro) brought up the "Preparing for Upgrade" dialogue but then failed with Error Code 0x80070490

Windows Upgrading

Failed to Upgrade Error Code 0x80070490

  • I also tried slmgr.vbs /ipk VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T. This errored with 0xC004F069 and said to run SLUI to get full details. enter image description here

  • I ran slui.exe 0x2a 0xC004F069 and it said enter image description here

  • However, I then ran slui.exe /upk to uninstall the Product Key, and then tried changepk.exe again, after rebooting the OOBE was now for Windows 11 Pro and I could create a local user and domain join. CMD showing windows version to be 11 Pro. Windows 11 Pro signup page.

Baa
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