Solved: Not Enough Disk Space to Upgrade to Windows 10

Not enough disk space to upgrade to windows 10

While trying to do Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 upgrade to Windows 10, users may receive a prompt message that says Windows needs more space and offers two other options to solve it, one is "Use Disk Cleanup to free up space", the other is "Choose another drive or attach an external hard drive with xx GB available" (shown as the below pic). What's worse, sometimes, the upgrading to Windows 10 process fails along with the error code: 0x80070057 or other errors because of not enough disk space.

Such problems will hapeen when the Windows 10 update needs more space on the system partition (usually C: drive) to store necessary files, but it does not have enough free space. Generally speaking, you will need about 8 GB free disk space to upgrade Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10. Besides, if installation packages of the newest Windows 10 contain all the language packs of operating system (OS), you might also be unable to upgrade to Windows 10 for not enough disk free space issue, which has been announced as a bug by Microsoft.

Fix “not enough free disk space to install windows 10 upgrade”

What to do when the Windows needs more space to finish the upgrade? You can free up disk space (like the error screen prompts) to reclaim some extra disk space from C: drive, or get some free space from other partitions to extend C drive space. Next, we have listed 4 methods to help solve the problem that there is not enough free disk space to install Windows 10. Check out them one by one and select a proper solution for your situation.

1. Disk Cleanup in Windows 10

Disk Cleanup, a Windows built-in tool, can be used to delete system or non-system files on your hard drives to help you free up more disk space.

Step 1. Right-click C:drive in File Explorer, and select “Properties”. Then you can launch “Disk Cleanup” there.

Step 2. A few minutes later, Disk Cleanup for (C:) window will pop out. Select types of files that you want to delete, and then click “OK” to proceed.

Step 3. Now you have deleted unwanted non-system files. Click “Clean up system files” and select the system files you want to delete as the step above. Under “More Operation” tab, you also free more disk space by removing programs that you do not use and system restore points.

2. Not to install latest update

Reduce the required disk space to install Windows upgrade. When upgrading to Windows 10, don’t let windows install the latest build. If you choose not to install the latest build, it will save at least 2.5 GB space for windows 10.

3. Uninstall language packs

Uninstall the language packs that you do not need. To do this, you just press "Win+R" at the same time, type “Lpksetup /u” in the “Run” dialogue and hit on “Enter”. In the pop-out screen, then select the unwanted language packs to uninstall.

4. Add more space to C drive for upgrading to Windows 10

If the above methods do not take visual effect, you can try to add more space to C drive and make it bigger enough to contain the newest Windows 10 installation. For this task, you can make use of the free partition manager: AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It allows you to get some unallocated space by shrinking another partition, which has lots of unused free space, and merge the unallocated space into C drive to enlarge it. Detailed steps are listed as following:

▶First, shrink a partition and get unallocated space

Step 1. Download, install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. click one partition (like D drive) that contains free space and select “Resize/Move Partition” on the left panel.

Step 2. Here, drag the bar to the left side to shrink it, and click on “OK”.

Step 3. Now, you can see there is unallocated space after the partition you just shrank. To make it real, click “Apply” on the tool bar.

▶Second, merge unallocated space into system drive

Step 1. Right-click the C drive and select "Advanced" > “Merge Partitions”.

Step 2. Tick the unallocated space in the list and click on “OK”.

Step 3. Finally, click on “Apply”.

If you want to skip the “shrink partition” part and directly transfer free disk space from one partition to the C drive, you can upgrade to Professional, whose “Allocate Free Space” can meet your requirements well.

Summary

With those 4 effective solutions, I believe you can find the most proper one to solve the “not enough disk space for Windows 10 upgrade” problem. If your current system disk is too small to spare extra space to C drive, you can also use the AOMEI Partition Assistant to upgrade the disk to a larger disk by its “Disk Clone Wizard”.