I thought I made it clear early on. You can upgrade if you use an external drive but need at least 3.5 GB free (and possibly more) to upgrade. This post is meandering and it is clear some of responders have not upgraded 32GB mmc devices.
So OP - your solutions are
1) free up enough space so update can be done (and may be trial end error, freeing space until it works).
2) clean install from scratch.
Windows will attempt to perform upgrades as the FCU just came out. The computer will fail any attempt to upgrade as there is insufficient free space for the upgrade. That may create some downtime which it displays windows is updating don't turn off the computer. You may still be able to perform updates such a windows defender or maybe even cumulative updates, etc. as there is still some space on the drive.
If cereberus can perform the upgrade from 1511 to 1709 you may want to give it a go. It may take modifying the free space on the drive and modifying the free space so there is at least 15 MB free in the system reserved partition. Freeing up the space to meet the listed requirements sees like a challenge.
Once you can backup the user files you can plan a clean install and move from 1511 to 1709.
For example if you can connect a 64 GB flash drive to a USB port you could copy all of the files. Then you could install Windows 10 version 1709 using a bootable windows 10 iso. Then you have to plan the longer term strategy. You could continue for a year or two like you just did with an old version or you could keep windows with very few applications on the internal drive and save everything else on an external drive.
For every subsequent windows upgrade you could keep the small drive and perform clean installs. You would no longer have to worry about the upgrade process, malware, corrupted operating system, etc. as you have all of the files on another drive and can keep performing clean installs.
Thank you cereberus for reiterating and zbook for expanding upon his point. I will try to carve out some more free space in the hard drive. 15gb of free space seems impossible, as my system is saying that 14gb is being reserved for the system. I don't know why other suggestions such as admin commands to delete the hibernation files and to compact the OS have not worked for me. If anyone has some simple ideas for freeing up space, that wont place my current apps at risk, they would be appreciated.
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