This is a quick post to describe how to reclaim disk space being used by an old Windows install. Recently, I upgraded to Windows 11 from Windows 10. I noticed that I was starting to run a bit low on disk space on my SSD. I have a 512 GB SSD and had less than 100 GB available:
I noticed that there is a folder named Windows.old that is 40 GB in size:
The instructions to reclaim the space seemed clear. Go to Settings -> System -> Storage and reclaim the space labeled as Previous Windows installation. However, ther was no such category when I tried:
After some searching and a little bit of thinking, I realized that this is probably a privileges problem. I became local admin by using the PAM tool. Then I ran the disk cleanup util as administrator:
I can now see that there are previous Windows installations:
I select to delete Previous Windows installations:
You have to confirm that it’s OK to delete:
The deletion process starts:
This will take some time…
There is now more space available:
If you’re running low on disk, check if you have previous Windows installations that you can clean up. You’ll need to have admin privileges to do so.
Thanks, didn’t know about this, got a couple of 100 gigs worth back.