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I am stuck on how to get my PC to boot.

  1. I thought the installation might be corrupted but I read that if your hard drive is full then it can cause Windows 10 to not boot. Low and behold I have 2048kb left of space on my SSD.
  2. I made a recovery USB and was able to get into an administrator CMD prompt but cannot delete files as it is write protected.
  3. I cannot remove the read-only attribute from the hard drive either. I read that if a HD is full that the HD can become write protected itself. How to I delete files so I can see if that fixes my Windows booting? I'm totally stuck.

The HD is also an M.2 so I don't have the ability to hook it to another machine at the moment to try and remove the files.

Seth Haberman
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    Have you dine a filesystem check on the disk? I believe that a corrupt fs may present as readonly if the filesystem is corrupt, which could be the case if its full. The solution is to fsck / chkdisk the filesystem and then mount it and free space. – davidgo Aug 12 '21 at 10:26

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You are correct that Windows throws its toys out of the pram when your hard drive gets too full because it needs some hard drive space for the page file. I guess if you put your rabbit in a hutch that was the same size as the rabbit, for example, your rabbit would have no room to move either!

I would suggest the following.

  1. Purchase an M.2 to USB enclosure, something like (but not necessarily specifically)
    SSK Aluminum USB 3.1 to M.2 NGFF SSD Enclosure Adapter
  2. Purchase another hard drive that is bigger than your M.2 drive (double is often a good ball park), something like (but not necessarily specifically)
    Samsung SSD 870 EVO 1 TB
  3. Install the new hard drive in your PC
  4. Install an OS on the new hard drive. Ensure that you create one partition for the OS and a different partition for your docs. The windows installer lets you do this in the advanced options.
  5. Use said enclosure to connect your M.2 hard drive to your PC
  6. back up (copy) your important documents, photos etc from your M.2 into the docs partition (not the OS partition) of your new hard drive
  7. Wipe the M.2 SSD - format it completely.
  8. Remove the new hard drive - mitigates any risk of inadvertently overwriting our important docs with an OS
  9. Install the M.2 drive in the M.2 slot
  10. Install an OS on the M.2.
  11. Reinstall the new hard drive
  12. Delete the OS partition on your new hard drive so that you are not dual booting the same OS. BE CAREFUL not to delete the docs partition.
  13. Expand your docs partition on your new hard drive to fill the drive.
  14. Job done!

A bit of shuffling but it is easy enough. Personally, I only use my M.2 drive for operating systems and applications as these need to load faster. I use standard SSDs for files, as they are plenty fast enough for storage. I have Windows & Ubuntu Linux (dual boot is handy) on the M.2 on my personal laptop, with all my files on a Samsung Evo SSD.

While your case is open, you might also like to take the opportunity to upgrade your RAM. It's an easy job and will help you out overall.

Just to be clear, always turn off your PC before adding or removing internal components like hard drives. These are not hot-swappable.

Finally, I think this is another fantastic illustration of the IT guy mantra, "If your data does not exist in five places, it does not exist at all." Backup your data! My data flows into these places,

  1. Laptop
  2. Local NAS
  3. Dropbox
  4. AWS
  5. GCP

Source: I have been an IT guy for over a decade.

Mokubai
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James Geddes
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  • Thanks for the tips! I am about to leave for a trip and need to access it before I can order anything. Just to make sure I understand, is there now way to delete files at this point without wiping the drive? – Seth Haberman Aug 12 '21 at 08:36
  • Have you tried booting into safe mode? That *might* provide you with a quick fix. – James Geddes Aug 12 '21 at 08:43