First published on TECHNET on Jan 07, 2019
Reserving disk space to keep Windows 10 up to date
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Updated Nov 09, 2023
Version 3.0
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Is there any way to recover some of this reserve from a non-system drive other than formatting it?
After adding an M.2 SSD and freshly installing Windows to this, I renamed the Windows folder on my HDD to Windows.old and used Disk Clean-Up to remove previous Windows installations. This did not, however, appear to result in any free disk space, but instead resulted in a large amount of the drive (85.9 GB) reserved for system use:
- 21.9 GB for System files (this is not my system drive);
- 30.2 GB for Reserved storage;
- 24.1 GB for Virtual memory; and
- 9.54 GB for Hibernation file.
This is in addition to the 36.3 GB reserved on the system SSD (16.2 GB System, 7.03 GB Reserved, 3.51 Virtual memory, & 9.54 GB Hibernation), so I doubt that the 85.9 GB of my non-system HDD that is inaccessible to me is actually being used by the system and I would like it back. I would hope that releasing this unused system reserve disk space could be incorporated into future updates of Windows 10 but in the meantime, is there any way I can force this without formatting the disk?