Windows 10: SOLVED How to free up space on D drive? Seems extremely difficult.

I ended up solving my own problem but I'm leaving this up for anyone else who might come across it! When googling this issue, I found a lot of other people had this problem, but I didn't find the solution I found anywhere in the threads I was looking up.


Two things were taking up huge amounts of space on my C drive- Spotify's cache folder, and my iPhone backup folder.


The Spotify cache folder was just deleted. You don't need any of it. It'll fill back up again soon, I'm sure, but I'll just keep deleting it every couple of weeks, lol.


The iPhone backup was taking up the most room by far. The workaround is ridiculous, butthis link shows how to fix it.


Freed up over 50GB of space! Yay!!



Original post is below

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Hi everyone, and thanks for any help in advance.


I have a Dell Inspiron with nearly 1TB of storage space, which was great because I never thought I would have a problem with storage space. For reference, the C drive has 103GB of space.


However it seems that any downloads, programs, etc are saving by default to my laptop's C drive instead of D drive.


Once I realized this, I had to move over all my documents, pictures, videos, etc and it was fine, but I was still slowly filling up the C drive somehow I really don't have any giant programs installed. Not sure why I keep losing space


Now I can't back up my phone anymore because I don't have enough space on my D drive anymore. I have no idea how it ran out of space so fast. I really haven't downloaded anything huge at all.


I've tried to uninstall programs and install them in the D drive instead, but Office 365 apparently must be installed in the C drive, and when I try to install iTunes in the D drive, I get an error reading "There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run." I can't be sure this is a drive error, but the program worked fine when I had it downloading and working in the C drive before. Yes, I do have a lot more programs, but they're 1. All around 50MB so not really taking up any space anyways and 2. I'm not gonna try to uninstall a bunch of programs just to find out they have to be installed in the C drive for them to work, it wastes time.


When I go into Windows Storage options, it says apps and features takes up 58.4 GB. However, most everything in there is less than 50MB, like I already said, so I really don't understand how it's taking up 58 GB.



"Other" and "Temporary Files" take up less than 2GB in storage so that's really not a problem at all.



Why am I running out of space so fast and what can I do to reduce what's saved there? It's incredibly annoying as I don't know why it's randomly filling up so fast and there doesn't seem to be a quick fix.

:)

 

Not enough space on Recovery (D drive.

Hi,



Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.

Please help me with the following:

1. What is the make and model number of your Computer?
   

Please note that recovery "D" is a partition on the hard drive which contains the image of the Operating system. You can use it to restore the computer back to factory settings. You should not attempt to store files in it.
If you have any data saved on the D drive, I would suggest you to move it to an external drive and to free up some space, you can follow the steps provided in the article:
Free up drive space in Windows 10.



If you are using a HP computer, then you can refer to this article:
HP and Compaq Desktop PCs - What is the Recovery (D Hard Drive?



Hope this helps.

Let us know if you got the help you needed by clicking on Yes or No.

 

D drive

Hi,

Based on the details you have provided us, it appears that there might be some corrupted contents on the said partition. We can also consider that this is caused by a virus.

For us to check if a certain virus is hiding your files, kindly follow the steps below:

• Type Command prompt in the search bar.
• Type-in the following command:
  
  attrib -h -r -s /s /d D:\*.*
• Press Enter to execute the command.

If you think that there is nothing important stored in it, then we suggest that you reformat your D drive so that you can use the free space for important files.

You can follow the steps below to start with the process:

• Click on the File Explorer.
• Select This PC.
• Right-click on your D drive, then click on Format.
• Follow the on-screen process to finish formatting the partition.

Let us know how it goes so that we can further assist you.

 

low disk space warning on d drive

Thank you for the response. I think you are right, I'm not sure I ever saw a D drive listed before. I tried what you advised but I don't have the option to select volume D. I hit remove=d but it says arguments invalid. Am I doing something wrong, any
other suggestions. Thanks