Deploy Windows 8.1 to Windows 8 via SCCM

We have some Windows 8 devices that needs to be upgraded to 8.1.  There is no installer for IE 11 and support has ended on Jan 12, 2016.  I did some research regarding upgrades for enterprise deployment tools but came across only a few articles that said the same thing.  It would have to be refreshed through OSD or downloaded through the Microsoft App Store.

I came across a Technet article of all things that didn't even come up as a top results for this and had a short mention for enterprise customers using SCCM 2012 to deploy the upgrade using the Windows 8.1 install media.  They must have added that upgrade switch later on because of the limited choices enterprise customers to upgrade and it wasn't easily found on any other tech sites.

Here's the article for reference:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn744271.aspx

The only applicable part for my scenario.

For organizations running Windows 8 Enterprise RTM, the Windows 8.1 update process is simply running the Windows 8.1 setup.exe with a few command-line switches. The switches used in this update scenario are commonly the following:

• /auto:upgrade. Required switch that runs the update process with no user interaction.
• /noautoexit. Optional switch. If something goes wrong during setup, wait for user input.

This means that if you have only a few machines to upgrade, or if you want to test upgrading a few machines, you can simply download Windows 8.1 Enterprise ISO and run the setup.exe /auto:upgrade command. For larger numbers, you probably want to automate the setup using System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager.

We're still on CM 2007 so I figured why not give this a try and if it works, we just saved a lot of time and resources, if not then it would have to refreshed or upgraded through some other means.

I have tested it successfully on an HP Elitebook 8440p and it upgraded w/o a hitch, I thought something went wrong when I couldn't connect to it 2 hours later but the next morning I tried again and it worked.  So even if they don't officially list CM 2007, I can verify that it works.  I'll have to re-run the upgrade to see what goes on and how long it takes.  The tablets are powered by Atom processors and have SSD so I'm not sure how long they will take.  The only issue with them besides their sites having low bandwidth is their drive is only 32GB and near full.  Deploying a 3GB install might not work if it requires a lot of space during the upgrade.

Looking at the execmgr.log it appears that the SCCM client was still working as it periodically re-ran the advertisements and provided a 0 status every few hours and stopped at 2AM with occassionally lines of system restarted in between.  I'm thinking CM 2007 could not accurately track the install from the command line.

An interesting "side effect" of the upgrade was that it generated 15 more resourceID entries in the DB.  It's all obsolete but didn't expect to see that.