Unable to Upgrade Windows 10 Home to Pro “We Couldn’t Upgrade Your Edition”

Recently, a customer brought a laptop to us. The laptop was running Windows 10 Home and the laptop needed Windows 10 Pro so it could be joined to a domain network. Normally, this upgrade process doesn’t take long. After paying for the Pro upgrade in the Windows 10 store and downloading the upgrade – we would reboot the computer. After every reboot of the computer, we got the following message:

“We couldn’t upgrade your edition. Try upgrading your edition of Windows again or contact your system administrator or Microsoft. Error code: 0x0 “We Couldn't Upgrade Your Edition Windows 10

As you can see, that error code doesn’t give you much information. After multiple attempts, I decided this wasn’t a fluke issue and decided that there much be some software issue.

Here is how I resolved this issue. I’m not sure which troubleshooting step actually solved the issue but the upgrade went smoothly after I did the following.

Step One: I uninstalled McAfee Antivirus software. I have never liked McAfee so I decided I would start there.

Step Two: I disabled all applications from starting up. Here is the list of applications I disabled from startup.

BlueTooth Tray Application

Catalyst Control Center

CyberLink MediaLibrary Service

CyberLink Virtual drive

HD Audio Background Process ( Three of These)

Lenovo Utility

McAfee

Microsoft OneDrive

Realtek HD Audio Manager

Synaptics TouchPadWindows 10 Startup Items

I started the Windows 10 Pro upgrade again and this time we were successful.Adding Features Windows 10 Pro

I hope this tip helps you. If you have had a similar experience, please post a comment below and follow me on Twitter.

This was posted by techspeeder.

25 thoughts on “Unable to Upgrade Windows 10 Home to Pro “We Couldn’t Upgrade Your Edition”

    1. Merlin Halteman Post author

      Awesome! Glad that you fixed the issue. Your input is valuable to me and our readers. Thanks

      Reply
    1. Merlin Halteman Post author

      Thanks for letting me know! There seems to be a trend that shows McAfee is the culprit.

      Reply
  1. Terry Jones (@TerryJonesMusic)

    I’m having the same issue, except I have Avast Antivirus installed rather than McAfee so I’m wondering if this is a general antivirus issue here instead. I’ll try again later today with Avast uninstalled/disabled and report back on how it goes…

    Reply
      1. Merlin Halteman Post author

        Awesome! Thanks for reporting back to me that it works. It helps everyone who reads this article.

        Reply
  2. Steve

    Yes worked! Thanks very much for the tip. I have avast, but had already tried disabling it – no luck; when I disabled all non-required start-ups, this allowed the upgrade to continue.

    Reply
  3. JKOOL

    Uninstalling McAfee antivirus also worked for me. was able to upgrade from home to pro with no issues. thanks for the tip.

    Reply
  4. ajbkfloit

    How did you restart the upgrade? I’m stuck in the same issue. Uninstalled McAfee and can’t figure out how to restart the upgrade.

    Reply
  5. le_klug

    Hey man. Thank you so much. It Worked fine.
    I recommend also to update windows 10 home to the latest version on windows update also.
    PS.: in my case, I haven’t disabled the startup applications

    Reply
  6. Jennifer

    We also had exact problem with Error 0x0 and had to completely uninstall Avast virus protection. This did the trick

    Reply
  7. Tigger

    Tried all the useful tips listed here such as uninstalling anti virus and disabling start up programmes but to no avail. Kept getting error code 0x0. In the end it was the version of Windows 10 home I was running which seemed to be the problem. I was running version 1703. Once I upgraded to 1709 it let me do the upgrade to Pro. By this time I had spent hours with at least 7 different Microsoft tech ‘experts’ jumping on my machine remotely to ‘help’ and try using the default product key etc only to lose them in the restart and have to go through the whole process again with a new techy. One even went into my account to help me re order the upgrade but my bank put a block on the transaction as the guy kept hitting refresh and it kept attempting to place new orders. Took ages to sort out but I did receive refunds from Microsoft for the duplicates. They are clueless on this issue. Sorry for the long post but wanted to share my experiences!!

    Reply
  8. Eric

    Same as Justin, turned off the three options in windows defender to disable it completely. Didn’t have McAfee to begin with. Worked right after disabling windows.

    Reply
  9. Paul Yates

    Hi there I’m having a problem upgrading windows 10 home to pro, it installs up to adding features 100% then says we couldn’t complete the upgrade undoing changes.

    I’ve updated windows to latest version also removed anti virus software disabled everything in start-up. Removed all devices attached to the computer, disabled the monitor, also run file checker all ok,changed the windows 10 home key!
    I’m at my wits end can you help??

    Reply

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