Use SD card D drive for Upgrades. SD card not recognized for upgrades?

I'm setting up a budget computer lab and I'm in possession of a bunch of windows 10 Mini pcs Z8350, with 2GB Ram and 32GB eMMC ss drives.

These little pcs work great to a point, after some quick optimization, and migration of larger files and applications to a SD card D: drive. I had Win 10 occupying 10-11GB. The problem I'm having is trying to persuade Windows 10 updates to load to the D: drive.

Windows even opens a dialog at one point suggesting use of an external drive, USB Flash or HDD, completely disregarding the fact that there is a 64GB NTFS D: drive available.

I'm using a common method to redirect updates from C: to D; using mklink /j C:Windows/SoftwareDistribution D:Windows/softwareDistribution.

What can I do to make my 64GB NTFS SD D: drives compatible with Windows 10 updates?

I don't think it is a matter of the downloads getting saved to the SD card, it's a matter of once the update runs it's looking for space to store temporary files. So far, Windows will only look for a USB flash drive or external HDD to store the temp files on.

It might be the C:\$WINDOWS.~BT folder that it is needing space for and I don't know if that can be redirected with a junction or not.

Thanks for the quick reply,

I don't think it is a matter of the downloads getting saved to the SD card, it's a matter of once the update runs it's looking for space to store temporary files.

This makes perfect sense, the files seem to download with the progress bar, but during deployment/initialization (forgot the displayed term) is when this failure occurs.

So I need to determine exactly which folder in C: drive is lacking space. Like C:\$WINDOWS.~BT ?? Then create a junction for that folder also.

Edward2 said:

Thanks for the quick reply,


This makes perfect sense, the files seem to download with the progress bar, but during deployment/initialization (forgot the displayed term) is when this failure occurs.

So I need to determine exactly which folder in C: drive is lacking space. Like C:\$WINDOWS.~BT ?? Then create a junction for that folder also.

I would try making a junction for C:\$WINDOWS.~BT, but I'm not sure how successful that will be, because I've never tried it. The major version upgrades also create windows.old to hold backup files for reversion back to the previous version of Windows.

I bet this location is specified in the Registry.

After I fully deleted the old C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution folder, freeing up 10+GB, the update 1709 finished. The 1803 update then began after restart. The 1803 then completed later.