Windows 10: Windows 10 upgrades using external hard drive

I am unable to use the latest upgrades due to lack of storage. My SD drive won't accept the new upgrades. Can I use
the Seagate - Expansion 1TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive

to accept the new upgrades?





:)

 

External hard drive is not working after upgrade to Windows 10

Original title: windows 10

Dear Sir

I have upgrade my windows 8.1 to windows 10 I face a problem with my external hard drive it was working perfect on windows 8.1 but after I upgrade to windows 10 the external hard drive is not working it show me the drive for 10 second after that my
laptop get freeze I have to remove the external hard drive to use my laptop, I hope to find a solution to use my external hard drive from your experience.

Yours

Muataz AL-Reyami

 

windows 10 media creation set up to the external HDD

USB device not recognized windows 10

External hard drive not recognized since upgrade to 10

Windows 10 does not recognize the external hard drive

Windows 10 not recognising external hard drive

 

You need to reduce the used space on your SSD.

Ideas discussed again recently e.g. here:
my SSD is already running out of space - Windows 10 Forums
Making Space to C drive - Windows 10 Forums

If desperate (I don't know how large your SSD is or if you have other disks) then after the above:
Compress or Uncompress Windows 10 with Compact OS General Tips Tutorials

 

Actually, plugging in an external drive will do the job as it will use that as temporary space, and even put windows.old on it if necessary.

You do need at least 3.5 GB free on internal drive though.

Of course, running main drive so full can lead to other problems.

 

Two questions:
Are you suggesting that I put windows.old on the external drive?
What kind of problems might occur on my main drive?; I have about 1. 5 GB remaining

 

Well, that's very little unless you only have a 32Gb drive, say (not stated in your specs).

You don't have personal control of Windows.old during the upgrade- creating that version of your Windows folder is part of the process.

You should most certainly seriously review your use of space for simple functional reasons. For example if your paging file is on your SSD, that's usually dynamic and could easily result in your system being significantly slowed.

 

Also, are you saying I can't add an external drive without 3.5 gb free on the internal drive?

 

Windows will check the system reserved partition MSR and it too needs to have sufficient free space so if you can download and install mini partition wizard and display an image into the thread.

 

Okay, but what is the minimum sufficient space needed?

 

Forgetting any external drive, you should allow about 20Gb free space on your disk for larger disks- or allow, say, the size your Windows folder is + 8Gb free space as a rough guide for the upgrade.

However I suspect your device has a small SSD (See article below).
Hence see the last URL in my first post.

Allow perhaps 1.5Gb unallocated space should Windows need to create a new Recovery partition (These were under 500Gb, but I've seen some bigger ones).

However for small SSDs note:
Microsoft cutting space requirements for Windows 10 - ExtremeTech

and generalised comments here:
Step-by-Step Guide to Reducing Windows 10 On-Disk Footprint

 

What are some good ways to create more space on my 29 gb hard drive? i have used System Mechanic, but not sure which programs I can delete otherwise.

 

Have you read the two threads in #2?

 

In a Command Prompt (Admin) or Powershell (Admin) run:

powercfg -h off

That will turn off hibernation and Windows fast startup and delete the system file used for hibernation which might give you some extra space. And the command:

compact /compactos always

Will ensure the OS is installed in the compacted state, and if it is not will get you some extra space.

I have two 32GB eMMC computers, they both have SD Cards inserted that I transfer user data files too. Both of them have over 10GB left in the 32GB eMMC. Also, unallocated space for the recovery partition is not required. No recovery partition at all is required if you don't want it. The "HDD" or "SSD" can have nothing but a System Reserved (or EFI System) partition that it boots from, which does need something like 50MB of free space in the partition itself, and the rest of the drive can be filled to the end with the OS partition and the upgrade will still finish as long as it can update the partition the computer boots from. On many installs the "Recovery Partition" is just a Recovery folder on the root of C: drive.

 

I tried both powercfg -h off and powercfg.exe -h off from the Command Prompt (Admin) and neither of them had any effect. Any suggestions to make them work?