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when trying to upgrade from windows 98 se to xp it tells me there isnt enough room on hard drive. i have an 80 gig drive half full, i tried defragmenting and got the same problem. i dont understand whats wrong, theres almost 40 gigs left on the drive. im confused. thanks for any help.

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Given ’s report (640 MB RAM and roughly 40 GB free) the problem is almost certainly where Windows XP Setup is trying to place its temporary files and the backup of the old OS — not total free space or memory. The installer checks the partition that it considers the “boot disk” (the active/system partition) and will fail if that partition is small, hidden, or has insufficient free space for setup’s temporary/backup files. (learn.microsoft.com)

Practical checklist that addresses the usual causes:

  • Confirm the upgrade is started from inside Windows 98 (run the XP setup from the CD’s i386 folder with winnt32.exe). Winnt32 accepts a /tempdrive switch to force where temporary files go, which often fixes this error when another partition has plenty of room. (learn.microsoft.com)
  • Verify which partition is marked active (the “boot disk”). On a Win98 machine this can be checked/changed with FDISK from a command prompt or startup disk; changing the active partition is powerful but risky — back up first. (learn.microsoft.com)
  • Check TEMP/TMP environment variables and make sure the temp folder exists on a partition with free space (Windows setup and other installers rely on the system temp location). If the temp folder is on a small or compressed partition, installers can fail even when another drive has lots of free space. (betaarchive.com)

Example command (run from a DOS/Win98 command prompt with the XP CD in D: — substitute letters as needed):

D:\i386\winnt32.exe /tempdrive:E

If these steps still fail, the safe fallback is a full backup of personal data followed by a clean install of XP (the upgrade path from 9x can be fragile if recovery partitions, unusual partition layouts, or third‑party disk utilities are present). Windows XP itself only needs ~1.5 GB for installation, but setup requires extra temporary/backup space on the boot partition, so ensuring the correct partition is active and has free space is the key fix. (news.microsoft.com)

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Member Avatar for jbennet

how much ram?

Member Avatar for PoemBoy

640 mb ram.

Member Avatar for hughv

What's the exact error message?

Member Avatar for PoemBoy

cannot find a physical hard drive with enough space to hold the temporary instal files

[gives list of all drives cd and hard drives]

I recently got it to work but there wasnt enough space, supposidly, to hold the backup of original OS so i quit install in hopes of making space by cleaning up and uninstalling some programs. then im back to error message :(

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