Upgrading from Windows 7/8/8.1/10 Enterprise to Windows 10 Education

This has been a hot potato with Windows 10, the fact there is a new edition of Windows 10 and that everyone using the school agreement isn’t allowed to use the Enterprise version of the OS. The must use new Education version which has its own media. When Windows 10 1507(10240) was released it was not possible to do an in-place upgrade from Windows 8.1 Enterprise to Windows 10 Education as you can only upgrade to higher SKU’s.

Starting with Windows 10 1511 (10586) this has changed so now it is possible to do an in-place upgrade from Enterprise edition to education and also use either Dism or a Provisioning package to achieve this. This is great news as it enables a lot more scenarios for us. One concern many have had as well is that you need to maintain more than one image which has been the case in the past to handle Enterprise, Education and Long-Term Servicing Branch. Now that we can use Dism for instance we can create our own reference image and then use Dism to change the edition from Enterprise to Education.

On a computer with the latest Windows 10 ADK installed, open the “Deployment and Images Tools Environment” as Administrator and then mount the Windows 10 Enterprise .wim file to check if we can upgrade it and to which editions.

In my environment:

dism /mount-image /imagefile:E:\DeploymentShare\Captures\WIN101511X64_edu.wim /index:1 /Mountdir:D:\mountdir

dism /image:D:\Mountdir /get-targeteditions

Then we can see that it is possible to upgrade to Education using Dism.

To actually upgrade the image to Education use the following commands in the “Deployment and Images Tools Environment” as above.

dism /mount-image /imagefile:E:\DeploymentShare\Captures\WIN101511X64_edu.wim /index:1 /Mountdir:D:\mountdir

dism /mount-image /imagefile:E:\DeploymentShare\Captures\WIN101511X64_edu.wim /index:1 /Mountdir:D:\mountdir

dism /image:D:\mountdir /set-edition:Education

dism /image:d:\mountdir /Set-ProductKey:NW6C2-QMPVW-D7KKK-3GKT6-VCFB2

dism /unmount-image /mountdir:d:\mountdir /commit

Then test deployment of the image and you should see an Education edition installed, also note that it is not possible to run Dism and change the Windows edition on a running operating system.