I'm trying to help my mom transfer pictures from her computer to a new external hard drive that has a capacity of 1 TB. However, whenever I attempt the transfer, I get an error message saying "Not enough space on Windows." It's confusing because while the C: drive is full, I thought I should still be able to move files to an external drive. Additionally, I tried deleting some apps to free up space, but it tells me I can't uninstall them due to insufficient space on the C: drive. I even formatted the external HDD to NTFS after researching solutions, but the error persists. Any ideas on what's going wrong?
4 Answers
Where exactly did your mom get the drive, and how much did it cost? Sometimes drives can report more space than they really have, which causes issues. Check how the drive is behaving. If you can’t transfer any files at all, it might be defective, and your mom should definitely reach out to the seller for a replacement or refund.
You could try disabling hibernation, which might remove some unnecessary files. Just open CMD as an admin and type in: powercfg -h off. It could free up some space on your C: drive.
Have you checked if you can delete some large files on the C: drive, like installers or big video files? Also, if you were trying to transfer a large batch of files, it might help to move just one small file at a time instead. That way, you can confirm if it works at all without hitting the error.
At first, I was trying to move everything all at once. Then I switched to transferring one folder at a time, which seemed to work until the error came back. Moving just one picture at a time would be tedious since my mom has a ton of photos. I’ll look for some files to delete!
It sounds like the files you're trying to transfer might be in a cloud service like OneDrive. Windows may need extra space to download them first. You could try transferring files one at a time or clear some space before you start the transfer.
She purchased it from a reputable computer store, so that shouldn't be a problem. The C: drive shows only 537 MB of free space, and the external HDD has 1.81 TB available. I was able to transfer some files, but then it threw the "not enough space in Windows" error again.