Not enough available space to upgrade to W10 on Aspire R11 R3 convertible laptop

I bought the Acer Sky Blue 11.6" R11 R3-131T-C1YF Convertible Laptop PC a few months back. It come standard with 2 GB of ram. I immediately purchased a ram upgrade and maxed out Ram capacity at 8 GB just to upgrade to windows 8.1.

I am now attempting to get my free upgrade to windows 10, but as I go through the installer, I get stuck. The installer states it needs 14+ GB free, which is not available on the internal hard drive (obviously). I cleared out as much as I possibly could on my C:/ and am only left with a few MB. Literally, nothing else can be cleared off the driver. I connect my external hard drive (which is 1TB and virtually empty) to get the additional space. The windows update only wants to use 10GB from it, and still wants 4.67GB on my C drive. I cannot get anymore because Windows 8.1, itself, is taking up the space.

I am stuck. Anyone else able to get around this? I have no idea what else to do. Help is appreciated.

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IronFly

have you run windows disk cleaner?

what's the size of your HDD?

padgett

That sounds like the one with a 32GB SDD So is in the same boat as a base W3 or W510 (have both at Win 10 now.

As I tell everyone, first create a recovery flash and save a full system image (that empty terabyte drive is a good place just make sure you have a NTFS partition.

Next you want to open file explorer and right click on the C: drive then click on "properties". When the window opens select "disk cleanup". Once the first round finishes click on "Cleanup Sytem Files". That will take longer but would wager you have a "Previous Windows installation(s)" files listing that is several GB (had one that was 16GB). Select that and any temporary or installation files & remove.

Now put a 16GB or larger SD card in the slot & upgrade. If it wants more space point at the SD card.

ElliHarriden

i have tried this yet it tells me upon restart to putthe card in the drive when italready is

billsey

It is possible the SD card isn't in the right format... Try FAT32 if it's NTFS or try NTFS if it's FAT32.

Rodriguez

This is a normal problem for this laptop, from the factory it comes with 32 Gb of space and no SSD or HDD drive, in other words, you just have 32 Gb to work with. and there inst any way to add more storage aside from adding a sd card.

padgett

I have posted all of the steps before but you need to be ruthless. Have several 32GB devices (both -x86 and -64) and all are running the latest available Win 10 with 12-14GB free even with a 1GB recovery partition. You will need auxiliary storage (either SDCard or flash) of at least 16GB and formatted NTFS.

For example the Office 365 "trial" (are other options such as Open Office and Libre Office which can be loaded on a SDCard) takes up over 900MB. After making a system recovery drive (at least 8 GB and formatted FAT-32) and system image (at least 32GB formatted NTFS) and saving offline any and all license keys, you may have to go to Settings>Apps and uninstall everything except Microsoft system files and internal hardware files (Broadcom, Atheros, etc.). Turn off Hibernation. With 8GB RAM you can reduce the swap file (pagefil.sys) to 300-500MB (can replace after the update is done). Anything installed from a disk or with a license key should be able to be uninstalled while the update is going on then reinstalled.

Finally, you can open File Explorer, right click on the C: drive, select properties, and check the box for disk compression. According to Microsoft when done (takes a while) that should reduce the disk space by 1.5GB (-x86) to 2.5GB (-64)

I have a brand new Aspire 3 here that out-of-the-box is using 37GB of pre-installed Win 10-64 and third party files but it has a terabyte drive.

Personally suspect that selling a new device like this is bad marketing because the "first timers" are the most likely to buy these (are primarily loss leaders) are the least likely to have the skills to be able to do all of this (/rant).

TrueFaith

I was in the exact same situation with my Acer R11-R3-131T-C1YF - full disk with Win 10 constantly attempting failed updates. Very frustrating. I first got myself a thumb drive and made a recovery drive, thinking I could then delete the recovery partition to gain some space. No luck. Deleting the recovery partition is not an option given on the R3 after the recovery drive process is completed. Tried a couple of free "partition manager" programs, but deleting a recovery partition was only possible in the PAID versions of those programs. What to do...
Finally, as padgett suggested above, I became ruthless and deleted everything but the bare minimum to keep the R3 running - and I mean EVERYTHING. While I never seemed to get to the required free disk space needed to complete installation of the latest version of Win 10, I WAS finally able to get the C Drive empty enough that I could at least do a "reset" using Acer Care. After the reset I now have over 10GB available. Once I get rid of all of the Microsoft "bloatware" that the Acer Care reset re-loaded onto my R3 all over again I'm sure I'll have a lot more, but for right now enjoying a clean install of Win 10 and having 1/3 of my C Drive EMPTY again is a wonderful thing!

padgett

Agree but probably the best thing is to add a 16GB or larger SD card or flash drive formatted NTFS. I have succeeded in updating a machine with only 6GB free on the main drive and a flash drive but the critical part is that it must be NTFS for the update to use (FAT is limited to smaller files than the updates require).

TrueFaith

Guess I got lucky. After resetting the R3 and acquiring over 10GB of space, Windows Update seems to have delivered the latest version of Win 10 to my Acer piece by piece. The last 24 hours have been an interminable slog of downloads, restarts and installs, followed by me dumping anything I could rid myself of from every new update before the next one started. I just installed the last "cumulative update" for 64-bit systems and am FINALLY showing Windows 10 version 1709 / Build 16299.309 completely installed and up to date. Storage is now at 17.6GB used and 11.4GB free after cleaning out the previous version of Windows and update logs. That's with only Google Chrome installed (needed for DirecTV NOW streaming.)
"Check for updates" comes up as "your device is up to date."
I'm still not 100% sure how I managed to get to this point or how Windows Update finally accomplished it's task after so many previous errors and failures, but I'll take it. Now the objective becomes running the Acer as lean as possible and hanging onto as much of those free 11.4GBs as possible going forward.

tgrfan2

I have gone through this too many times. I am ready to go the Linux route. Has anyone tried Cinnamon? It is supposed to be about 1.5 GB. I installed Linux on an old Dell with little storage back when W 10 came out.
I have an Apple Mini for video but I hate it for email which would be my primary use for the Acer going forward. Thanks.

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