Been having trouble updating Windows 10 on this laptop, any ideas? (don't want to reinstall, too much hassle to reconfigure everything)

PianoPlayer88Key · December 12, 2022

Hi... so I've not been able to do any updates on this laptop since 1909, other than the periodic monthly security patches and things like that.

Basically, it keeps giving me an 0x80070002 error, and if I try the Windows 10 upgrade tool from MS's website, it says "We can't tell if your PC has enough space to continue installing WIndows 10." (Also I was just googling that error, and it was remind me that I'd like to find a way to filter out search results from sites trying to peddle their own product that targets that specific thing. A couple examples that came up when searching were drivereasy, easeus, partitionwizard, and I've seen a lot more when searching for similar things involving updating an OS, repartitioning a drive, etc. Maybe it's just me, but I am very wary of first-party recommendations in general, I want to see third-party reviews, among other things.)

From what I can tell, this PC most definitely HAS enough space, and then some.

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The laptop is a Clevo P750DM-G, with an i7-6700K, 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4-2133 RAM, GTX 970M 6GB, and four SSDs - 2TB and 4TB 2.5" SATA and 2TB and 4TB M.2 NVMe.

Windows is installed on the 4TB 2.5" SATA SSD. I wanted to migrate it to NVMe a few years ago when I got a 1TB NVMe SSD, but I couldn't figure out how to clone from SATA to NVMe without having major problems or having to reinstall, so I just stuck with SATA.

This is the third SSD that I've run Windows from on this laptop. Before this 4TB SSD which I just recently got this past Black Friday, I was using a 1TB WD Blue 3D 2.5" SATA SSD for a few years, and before that I was using a 250GB Crucial MX200 M.2-2260 SATA SSD. The problem with being unable to update started around the time I got the 1TB SSD, maybe a little later, idk.

I even moved some things off C: to free up a bit more space (even though I already had 3.6TB free), so I could get the used space down below about 160 GB, in case for some reason Windows was still thinking I was trying to update on the original 250GB SSD. (In that case, I think having about 90GB should have been plenty...)

Any ideas what could be going on, or something I should change to get Windows to update properly? Is there some setting I need to change somewhere, or do I need to take a look at something involving the other partitions on the SSD that I think Windows put there when I originally installed in Q1 2016?

Or will I just have to live with the laptop being stuck on 1909 for the next few years or so?

I'm not about to reinstall Windows on this laptop, as everything I have set up would be way too much of a hassle to reconfigure. Even if I tried, I still would never be able to get it exactly the way I had it set up. And I've had that same inability to exactly clone my configuration pretty much ever since I've used PCs since the 1990s or so, which is a major factor in me trying to avoid OS reinstalls as much as possible - I pretty much ONLY do it if I'm getting entirely new hardware, like a new laptop, or a new motherboard that uses a totally different generation of RAM, CPU socket, etc.

About a new laptop... I had thought of getting a GPD Win Max 2 a few months ago, since I'd like something a lot more compact (preferably something pocket sized, although I'd have to get cargo pants to pocket the GPD; with a full-desktop, multitasking, virtualization-capable x86/64-compatible OS which rules out tablets and phones), but I really didn't want to downgrade my RAM and storage capacity. (Also I wouldn't really need a GPU upgrade cause I don't game much except older games, but would have wanted a significant CPU threads upgrade since I would run a lot of VMs - minimum being the Ryzen 6800U in that GPD, but preferably as many or more threads as my desktop's Ryzen 5950X although I'd be okay with only matching the single-core performance of my current laptop probably; also would want much lower power consumption so I could run full-load all day without running out of battery. Also I kinda almost want to wait to buy a new laptop until we're on DDR6, as just upgrading from one generation to the next (DDR4 to DDR5) is too soon for me.)

My desktop did successfully get updated to 22H2, although that one's having some other issues right now involving transferring data from 8TB and 10TB HDDs to a couple 18TB HDDs, and other things, but that's 1 - a topic for another post, and 2 - I don't think I'm ready to post about it yet, there's still some things I want to try on my end before I ask for much help on it. (I don't think it's an issue with the drives though, as sometimes several drives will become unresponsive at the same time, and when I'm on WIndows (although I was running Linux at the time of doing the file transfers due to Windows hiding some files even from admin accounts), other things will happen at the same time, like my ASRock B550 Taichi's wifi becoming unresponsive and not detecting any connections at all. Usually a reboot fixes it.... for a while.... I just hope it's not something wrong with the motherboard as I don't want to take the system apart until I'm upgrading to either DDR7 mainstream, or DDR6 HEDT/workstation.)