How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations

How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations. All 3 of my laptops are running Windows 10.

Most of the time, during Windows 10 upgrade to the new build process, I face issues like there is not enough space to install the new build. So the question is how to remove/clean the Previous Windows Installations from my Windows 10 laptop?

Yes, we can manually delete or remove the folders called Windows.old and Recovery Image. But I’ve seen most of the time Windows.old folder won’t get deleted because of some issues.

How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations

In this post, I will discuss another option for disk cleanup “previous Windows installations“.

Patch My PC

1. Go to System Drive –> This PC –> OSDisk (C:) –> Right-click Properties –> Click on Disk Cleanup

How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations
How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations

2. On Disk Cleanup of OSDisk (C:), select files to delete: Previous Windows Installation(s).

Files from a previous Windows Installation. Files and folders that may conflict with the installation of Windows have been moved to folders named Windows.old. You can access data from the previous installations in this folder. Once you remove this, 26.3 GB in my case, I can easily perform the next Windows 10 build upgrade !!

How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations
How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations

3. Click OK on the Disk Cleanup (C:) window. Click on “Delete Files” confirmation to proceed further. By the end of this process, Windows.old folder will be removed from Windows 10 machine, and you can save more than 10 GB of space !! How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations.

Adaptiva
How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations
How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations

4. Once Disk Clean up is done (completed), you can see the difference in the free space of the C drive. When you try to perform Disk Cleanup again, you won’t get the option to delete the previous windows installations.

How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations
How to Clean Remove Previous Windows 10 Installations

Resources

Windows 10 Latest Version Of Client Operating System From Microsoft (anoopcnair.com)

Author

Anoop is Microsoft MVP! He is a Solution Architect in enterprise client management with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is a blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. E writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc…

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