Windows 10 Disc Storage

[tractorian]

The problem is with an elderly HP Stream Laptop running Windows 10 Home. It has a 23Gb C: Drive and a 32Gb D: Drive on a card. System Update keeps reporting that the current Home system is past its best and needs upgrading. Unfortunately, the C: drive has only 1.8Gb spare. This is after relocating Downloads, Documents, Videos, Photos to the D: Drive using the Location option in Properties.This is not enough for the update, which requires several Gbs.

Even after downloading windows.iso, etc. onto a USB and running from that, the problem persists.

One answer would be to tempoorarily move Program Files, Program Data and User folders to the D: drive. Unfortunately, the Location option is not availabe on these folders. Googling the problem, it seems this can/could be done, but the solutions shown no longer exist in the Settings\Apps routine.

Anyone know how to move these folders, or, indeed, if they can be moved, or suggest another way of overcoming the prolem, for example, by installing the new Windows 10 system on the D: drive?

[martinc]

Have you done the disk cleanup? I have 2Gb of thumbnails on my system. Also Cleanup System Files should give some more space

[tractorian]

Yes, done that. Deleted all Apps, even replaced the original set-up account to get rid of any debris there might have been there.

[swill453]

Difficult to suggest a solution when you haven't actually focussed in on the problem area.

If you download a tool like Treesize Free, you can analyse the disk and see what's taking up the space. There is a portable version that can be run from a USB stick so you don't need to waste valuable space by installing it.

https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free

Scott.

[Infrasonic]

It's probably a 32GB eMMC drive, have a look at the partitions and see if the original recoveries etc. are still in place.
You could wipe unneeded partitions and merge with the C drive partition - W10 will have that capability but I use MiniTool Partition Wizard 12.5 (free) as it's a bit more granular and has more file system formatting options (FAT32 / exFAT / NTFS / EXT*).

Feature Updates to W10 will try and write a backup .old file, which is several GB in size and will quite possibly put you over even on a tidied up system drive. I can't remember if it's possible to knock out the auto backup file process, have a search. As long as you are backed up using Macrium Reflect or similar then the .old file is moot anyway. (It gets auto deleted after a week or so).

[Infrasonic]

Another option would be to wipe the drive completely and clean install W10 (using your USB MCT), then uninstall all *unnecessary W10 apps. and back that up as a minimal system image which you can restore to if needs be at a later date if the update space issue comes up again.

* There are guides out there showing how to do it, just be careful as some W10 apps that appear superfluous are tied into more fundamental system level protocols like networking.

It is possible for a skilled repair tech to de-solder the eMMC from the motherboard and swap out for a bigger drive - whether it would be economically justifiable for such a cheap low powered laptop is debateable.

You can boot W10 persistently from an external like a USB SSD - it's not for the faint hearted though. If you search Windows to Go you'll see al the variables. MS stopped supporting the official version (which was an enterprise only offering anyway) but there are plenty of DIY/third party options that will work across the board.

[Infrasonic]

This will help overall too...https://portableapps.com/

[Breelander]

The problem is with an elderly HP Stream Laptop running Windows 10 Home...

Unfortunately the HP Stream range typically has a 32GB eMMC drive...

Hard Drive - 32GB eMMC

https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c04490851

...that is really too small for Windows 10 (well, it's plenty for Windows, but not enough to run an upgrade). Microsoft now say that OEMs can only supply W10 on machines with a minimum of a 64GB hard drive.

But there are ways and means to upgrade a machine with too little free space. Typically this involves providing temporary external storage that can be used during the upgrade, such as an external USB HDD. The upgrade process can then use this to store temporary upgrade files and put the Windows.old folder there, should you need to go back to your previous version of Windows.

Get more space with external storage
You can temporarily gain extra space by using an external storage device like a USB drive, an SD card, or an external hard drive.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... 6d16fa1d65

[tractorian]

Infrasonic, thanks for all your suggestions, but slow down, I can't keep up.

I had a look in Data Management and saw that (on the c: drive) Drive 1 was 260Mb, with 260Mb free, Drive 4 was 966Mb with 351Mb free and C: drive was 27.7 Gb with 2.02 Gb free. The system would not allow me to shrink either 1 or 4 - the options were 'greyed out' and unresponmsive, but even so, there's not enough space there to make a difference

Interesting what you said about changing the drive because I also had thought that getting an SSD might be the solution. There are videos on youtube showing how the hard drive can be taken out and (hopefully) replaced, but your comment about soldering has made me think again.

Another problem I've had is trying to sort out the BIOS to enable a boot from USB, it looks like nothing I've seen before and nothing I've done so far has produced a USB boot.

But, thanks again for you help, I will press on. As they say, the battle isn't over until the fat lady sings!!

[Urbandreamer]

Interesting what you said about changing the drive because I also had thought that getting an SSD might be the solution. There are videos on youtube showing how the hard drive can be taken out and (hopefully) replaced, but your comment about soldering has made me think again.

The reason that it's assumed that the "hard disk" is in fact a memory chip soldered to the board is because that is what was done with many HP Stream computers. Some however had hard disks.
Double check your model.

Laptops are quite a personal choice, but I buy second hand Thinkpads because historically they have been easy to work upon and upgrade. However they still look more or less like they did 20 years ago and are quite heavy.

Returning to your machine. It may be possible to shrink and move partition 3 (the D drive). If that leaves unused space then partition 2 (the C drive) could be extended.

Can you live with a Wifi dongle? It may be possible to replace the internal Wifi adaptor with an mSata card. You could then use macrium to relocate partition 3 (D) to the new ssd and resize it. Finally you could remove partition 3 and resize partition 2 to give you a C drive that is double the size.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/HP+Stream+ ... +SSD/55353

I replaced the internal 3G adaptor on my thinkpad X230 with a mSata and put Windows 10 on it. It wouldn't boot, because the bios wouldn't boot from that device. However that wasn't an issue because I put linux on the 2.5 SSD and can boot either, as the boot loader lives on the primary disk.

If you are confident, then it may be possible to put a boot loader like GRUB on the emmc and directly boot windows from the mSata giving you a 128 or 512G machine.

[tractorian]

Thank you all for your suggestions.

There are further complications. When Windows 10 told us that our Windows was out of date it gave us the option to update. This was taken.

The update downloads and gets as far as discovering there isn’t enough storage. It then presents us with the option of using the D: Drive - 23Gb available. On clicking on Next, it then presents us with the option of deleting files from the C: Drive, and closes when we can’t. At no time does 'Fix' appear.

Settings/Windows Update is now ‘stuck’ in ‘Download 100%’. Running Troubleshooter has no effect. It says it’s done the job, but gets us back to ‘Download 100%’. No other options, such as ‘Suspend Updating for 7 days’ is available.

Running from the downloaded USB Windows 10 set up just ties us into this endless loop.

The Bios won’t let us change the boot sequence, so deleting the C: Drive and re-installing from the USB is not on, so the fat lady is still waiting to sing..

[Infrasonic]

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/163 ... grade.html
There's related tutorials at the bottom of the link too.

If there's no USB boot option in the BIOS (been there with HP) it is possible to use third party boot manager apps like Plop which will add it.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html


https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

On older low powered machines which haven't been updated for some time it can take a loooong time to update W10.
I once left an 11 year HP desktop updating all day and overnight - eventually it succeeded.

If there isn't enough space on the SD*card to use as swap storage for the Windows.old folder can you not put in a larger card?
What's the max size the Stream will recognise?

[Urbandreamer]

The Bios won’t let us change the boot sequence, so deleting the C: Drive and re-installing from the USB is not on, so the fat lady is still waiting to sing..

You may need to set the Bios into Legacy mode to boot from USB. Alternatively you may need a Ufei bootable USB.

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook- ... -p/6073163

This link might be helpful if you want to go Windows only with uefi.
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-crea ... fi-support

This link if you find that Linux has more useful tools I believe that Yumi is the way to go for uefi.
https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-mult ... b-creator/
Note that for YUMI to work with uefi the USB must currently be formatted fat32.

Personally I would first try to make a bootable linux USB to copy any data off the HD. After that you could try resizing partitions if you want to try and get the existing Windows to finish it's update. Or you could wipe the HD and use a Windows 10 installer. Or install a linux distro.

EDIT: just realised that D is a SD card, so little point in resizing partitions.

[Breelander]

The update downloads and gets as far as discovering there isn’t enough storage. It then presents us with the option of using the D: Drive - 23Gb available. On clicking on Next, it then presents us with the option of deleting files from the C: Drive, and closes when we can’t...

Get yourself a large USB external drive, preferably an HDD but a large (64GB or larger) USB stick (formatted as NTFS) would do. Plug it in before trying to update, it should then offer to use that and with more free space it is more likely to succeed.

[tractorian]

Success, well almost.

After several more fruitless attempts to update the system I decided to accept the offer provided when running from the Windows.ISO download to delete the installed Windows partition. The new Windows 10 (21H1?) installed without a problem.

Well, there is one. Windows 10 doesn’t have drivers for the installed 32Gb Sandisk SDHC card and the Sandisk website says it’s no longer supported. Several other websites offer the chance to download their libraries, but are they safe?

[tractorian]

I should have mentioned its a micro card. How do you update something you've already posted on here?

[tractorian]

The penny has dropped. It's not the Sandisk drivers I need, but the drivers for the device. The answer was staring me in the face in Control Panel's Device Manager.

[tractorian]

The fat lady is singing.

[servodude]

The fat lady is singing.

Didn't go for NTFS then?

[tractorian]

It would have been very rude of me to ask her her age, don't you thing?