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If you are a regular Microsoft Windows user, then you are most likely used to there being Windows updates on a regular basis. You may have even installed Windows yourself once or twice (or many times) after building your own computer. For the most part, Windows updates and upgrades go smoothly. But that doesn’t mean you will eventually run into some sort of problem that prevents you from performing these upgrades and updates.
If you are trying to upgrade your computer and get a message that says, “We couldn’t update the system reserved partition”, you may think that you are out of luck and stuck with the current state of your PC. And if you are using the GPT (GUID Partition Table) scheme rather than MBR (Master Boot Record) scheme, you may find it difficult to fix this issue since you cannot extend the system partition when using the GPT scheme. In this article, we will be showing you how to free up space on a GPT configured EFI system partition so you can upgrade your PC.
The image below is what you might see when you do not have enough free space on your EFI system partition to upgrade or update your computer. The message is a little vague because it doesn’t tell you what needs to be done to get past it.
If you were to open up the Windows Disk Management tool, you would see the size of your EFI system partition and will notice that it is rather small and tends to be around 100MB.
You will also notice that there is no way to expand the size of the EFI system partition from Disk Management. This is mainly because it uses the GPT partitioning scheme. If you were to right click the disk itself, choose Properties and then go to the Volumes tab, you would see that it is using GPT for its partition style.
Even if you use a third party disk partition editor such as NIUBI Partition Editor, you will not be able to expand the EFI system partition.
To get around this, you can try to free up space on the GPT configured EFI system partition to allow you to upgrade your PC. To do so, you will need to open an administrative command prompt.
From there, you will need to run several commands to free up space on the EFI system partition. Here are the commands you will need to run and what they will do.
mountvol y: /s – Mount the EFI system partition.
y: – Access the new Y drive.
cd EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Fonts – Change to the Fonts directory.
dir – View the contents of the Fonts directory to make sure you see the .ttf font files so you know you are in the right folder.
Now you can delete all of these font files using the following command.
del *.* – Delete all the files in the Fonts directory
Once the process is complete, you should see an increase in the amount of free space for your EFI system partition.
You can then unmount the drive with the following command.
mountvol y: /d
Now you can try to upgrade or update your computer again and see if you were able to free up enough space on your GPT configured EFI system partition. After you perform your upgrade or update, the fonts should be re-added to the folder.
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