Well it’s finally out, and it’s massive! I mean crazy big. It requires 16GB to update, and well it’s lying! It really requires about 22GB! Why? Because it won’t let you start the update until you have 16GB, and when it starts downloading the update, you obviously then have less than 16GB, so the installation fails, and then worse still, once it’s downloaded it can’t expand it!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I bet at least one of your Windows 10 or 8.1 devices you upgraded to 10 only has 32GB of eMMC. So I decided to wipe my Toshiba Mini Click to post Windows 10 upgrade, but refreshed. It left me with 16GB of free space. Started the download and fails.

So, I was looking at the partition layout, and decided to remove the additional 5GB recovery partition, as, well, I need the space, and don’t want to ever go back to Windows 8.1 anyhow.

So, tried to remove the partition but can’t as it’s 1. A recovery partition and 2. it wouldn’t matter anyhow, as I’d still have to move the other 500MB Recovery partition to the end, or just delete that too, and hopefully Windows will re-create it?!

But, then an added problem! It’s BitLocker encrypted! So finding the right freebie to do my re-partitioning and delete it! I normally use AOMEI, as it’s quick, doesn’t install junk and isn’t any better than any of there others! But only to discover it does not support BitLocker 🙁 So my next freebie is EaseUS, now I personally don’t like this, as it installs all kind of other junk you never asked for, and that really annoys me. But, it’s free and it does the job! Just remove it all after, as it’s a clean installation of Windows anyhow!

So, I now have 21GB and away it downloads, and then starts to unpack and fails, as it runs out of disk space! Aaaaaarrrrggh! So head scratching here, realise it downloads the Windows 10 Update image to C:\Windows10Upgrade, so move it to my SD Card (D:) and run the update again. Pain in the neck thing starts downloading the update to the C: drive again. So here’s the solution!

Copy the Windows10Upgrade folder from the C: drive to a USB disk or SD Card, we’ll refer to D: drive. Now delete the copy on the C: drive, and create a Directory link from C:\Windows10Upgrade to D:\Windows10Upgrade, therefore the installation thinks the download is on the C: drive, but actually it’s on the D:, and now there’s plenty of disk space to complete the upgrade!

To create the directory link, Open up a Command Prompt (Administrator) and enter the following command:

MKLINK /D C:\Windows10Upgrade D:\Windows10Upgrade

I really hope they fix this issue, why it has to download to the C: drive, Microsoft only knows! But in an earlier update, it used to detect a USB or SD drive with enough space and use that temporarily, hopefully they’ll add that feature in to this update and help a lot of the devices out there with hardly any disk space to actually receive this update! But in the meantime, I hope this helps!