One of my clients ran into a problem while trying to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to Professional using the Windows Anytime Upgrade tool. Instead of working as usual, they received the following message:
Windows Anytime Upgrade failed
The only solution he suggests is to try the update again, but it doesn’t work. Clicking on the link “Go to the Internet to solve this problem” will not do you any good either. After doing a little research, I figured out what the problem was and was finally able to update the client computer. This essentially happened because Windows Update downloaded Service Pack 1 to the computer but was not installed by the client. Because of this, Windows Anytime Upgrade considers it to be a kind of partial installation and blocks the upgrade.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the possible solutions. If you are still having problems or this error, please leave a comment here and I will try to help.
Method 1 – Microsoft Fixit
You can rid yourself of anything by downloading and running the Microsoft Fixit solution for this specific problem. You can download it directly from Microsoft:
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If that doesn’t work, keep reading.
Method 2 – Uninstall Windows 7 SP1
The next thing you can try to do is uninstall SP1 and then try running Anytime Upgrade. To do this, you need to run Command Prompt as administrator. Click Start, type CMD, then right-click cmd.exe and select Run as administrator.
At the command prompt, enter the following command:
DISM.exe / online / remove-package /packagename:Package_for_KB976932~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.1.17514
This command is for Windows 7 32-bit. If you are using Windows 7 64-bit, you need to enter the following command:
dism.exe / online / remove-package / packagename: Package_for_KB976932 ~ 31bf3856ad364e35 ~ amd64 ~~ ~ 6.1.1.17514
Exit Command Prompt and restart your computer. Now try Windows Anytime Upgrade and see what happens.
Method 3 – Uninstall SP1 Beta
If you have installed Windows 7 SP 1 beta, you need to uninstall it. Again, these are two different commands, one for 32-bit and one for 64-bit. You just need to open an elevated command prompt as I showed in Method 2. Then run the following command for the 32-bit version:
dism.exe / online / remove-package / packagename: Package_for_KB976932 ~ 31bf3856ad364e35 ~ x86 ~~ 6.1 .1.17105
And run this for 64 bit:
dism.exe / online / remove-package /packagename:Package_for_KB976932~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.1.17105
If you are still having problems with Windows Anytime Upgrade error or error message, please leave a comment here and I will try to help. Enjoy!
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