Solved Error 0x800704ec upgrading Home to Pro info.

For a while getting the above error when trying the upgrade. Tried the usual - disabling Antivirus and even a repair install but nothing worked.

Just remember that a while ago messing around to get gpedit.msc on to Windows Home which works partially,


Today ran @Brink 's tutorial to create a bat file to restore group policy to default settings

Reset All Local Group Policy Settings to Default in Windows 11

and then the upgrade worked flawlessly. Have been puzzling this issue for a while until the penny dropped today.

I suppose the moral of this story is to remember that whatever changes you do could give bad results in the future. So just a heads up if you do get the 0x800704ec error when trying to upgrade.

0x800704ec = ERROR_ACCESS_DISABLED_BY_POLICY
This program is blocked by group policy.
For more information, contact your system administrator.

zbook said:

0x800704ec = ERROR_ACCESS_DISABLED_BY_POLICY
This program is blocked by group policy.
For more information, contact your system administrator.

Click to expand...

The error sometimes was accompanied by 'we cannot upgrade this version of Windows'. This was puzzling as I was trying to upgrade Windows Home. Obviously,now, it was because of the group policy enablement that this error happened. Just took me a while to remember what I had done previously. A senior forgetful moment (again)

Any idea which policy caused the problem?

pokeefe0001 said:

Any idea which policy caused the problem?

Click to expand...

I believe the problem was that the upgrading process thought that the version of Windows was already Professional because of the group policy enablement on Windows Home. I reset Group Policy to default on Windows Home and it upgraded
Thinking about it Group Policy default settings in Home is disabled.