How to allocate 20GB+ for Win10 on an Upboard with just 16GB eMMC

Aurelien

Hi All,
I just bought an Up Board with 16GB eMMC. I did not pay attention but Windows 10 requires a minimum of 20GB to work well. Is there any elegant way to run a Win 10 on an upBoard with 16GB and make Win 10 OS "believe" that the board has more than 16 GB? for instance by using an external USB stick of 32GB and storing some part of the Win10 OS on the USB stick ? Did anyone try it, is it OK or too slow?
Aurelien

Andy Nicholson

The simple answer is no.

But your question isn't really the right way to go. Instead of fooling the OS to thinking there's more hardware than there is you have two options.

1) Actually use extra hardware. I guess you have the original UP not the UP2 which can accept more storage, and I don't have an original board to test with but you could try running from a USB drive, either by booting to a Windows To Go disk, or perhaps if the bios allows installing directly to a USB drive, but I doubt that's possible.

2) Alter the Windows 10 image you're installing to adjust for your needs appropriately. This is a really useful and powerful skill to learn as it means you can tailor your images to just the right way. I'm having trouble with my UP2 at the moment and might need to send it back so can't really test properly, but I have created cut down Windows 10 images in the past where the install ISO is less than 1GB. Now, obviously these are going to be exceedingly limited and potentially insecure (depending on your application), and IIRC was a 32bit OS. Everything I did not need was purged like IE, all the store apps, localization files, update services, defender etc etc, but it did allow me to load a "bare" OS and to run the lightweight .net applications I needed on 500Mb ram, 10GB disk system. Then there are tricks like changing the shell (the desktop environment) to another application and you will save a fair chunk of RAM use, but again, this means you lose the desktop, taskbar, start menu etc.

I am by no means an expert, but I've been wanting to make a guide for people here on how to do this, but after delivery complications with my original UP board (that I had to cancel in the end) and now my CPU/GPU driver issues on my UP2 (that I think I'll have to send back ) it's taking a loooooong time.

If you wanted an easy way to start messing around take a look at NTLite - https://www.ntlite.com/ - and you'll also need to download a Windows 10 Pro ISO in order to be able to have the most flexibility in removing componenets, you can download one using the media creation tool here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10