How on earth am I supposed to upgrade to Win 10 on a PC with nothing but a 20GB drive?

Raven A

Honorable
Feb 2, 2015
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0
10,640
Alright, so I have a multibook, which runs on 32bit Win 8.1. Its C drive is 32GB, of which only 21GB is usable. Through the Windows Icon in the toolbar, I reserved my upgrade for Windows 10 (so I have all requirements).

Then when I tried to actually download it, there was an error, saying I didn't have enough space on my PC, and after selecting a large external hard drive to store additional data on, I still had to free an additional 5,5GB on the C drive, which is simply impossible, as Windows itself takes up 18GB of the 21GB on my C drive (this was after selecting a large external hard drive for storing additional data). Well, I went cleaning anyway, and after cleaning about 3GB from the C drive, for some reason, it worked and initiated the upgrade.

Then, during the upgrade, another error showed up, saying that something was wrong and it would roll back to Windows 8.1. This happened in the window with the black screen and white progression circle, at around 50%. I've tried it at least 5 times now and every time the same thing happens.

Now I don't know what's wrong. It could be that I still actually don't have enough room on my C drive. I also found something on the internet about a corrupted recovery partition, but I could change anything in my recovery partition (besides, I'm not really sure what it does so I don't dare delete it). This partition does use 7,5GB so clearing it might help, if possible.

One thing I tried was do a full system recovery of my PC, but that got an error too! About half a minute into the recovery it would say that the system did not restore and will go back to how it was before (without losing anything).

Another thing I tried was installing the windows 10 update on a USB through the media creation tool. But then it would never give me the option to actually install it on the USB, and it would say that the drive is too full to download the upgrade again.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
Solution
I recently Upgraded my Asus Transformer. 32GB drive.
It was brand new, and thus a bare 8.1 32bit install.

Download the ISO file on another PC, burn the ISO file to a USB, and upgrade with that, booting from that USB.
Windows 10 only needs 11GB installed. Something else must be at fault.

Microsoft System Requirements
Here are the system requirements for Windows 10:

Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for a 32-bit version, or 2GB for 64-bit
Hard disk space: 16GB for a 32-bit OS; 20GB for 64-bit OS
Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
Display: 1024x600
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I recently Upgraded my Asus Transformer. 32GB drive.
It was brand new, and thus a bare 8.1 32bit install.

Download the ISO file on another PC, burn the ISO file to a USB, and upgrade with that, booting from that USB.
 
Solution

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Your Recovery Partition is put there by the manufacturer in the event you want to return the device back to factory spec.
There should be a function in there to create a USB from that. Do that and store it in your desk drawer.
You can then delete that Recovery partition.