Diary of a Wolfeman

If you’ve recently encountered this error when trying to run a Windows update, the problem may be that your system reserved partition is full, which prevents the update procedure from starting. The trick is getting into it and clearing the space.

You may have seen some solutions for this already that just delete the fonts from the EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Fonts\ folder, but in my environment that wasn’t sufficient space reclamation so I had to go a step further and delete a bunch of the unused language files from the folder one level up. The trick here is to not delete the folders you actually need for your local language.

So, start of by launching an elevated PowerShell session, and then run the following commands to get into said folders:

mountvol y: /s
cd y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot
dir

This should get you a list of all the language folders. Copy that out and then build a script to mount the volume, delete the folders recursively, delete the fonts as well, and then unmount the partition. NOTE: take care to preserve your local language folders – you’ll notice the script below does not delete the English folders “en-US” or “en-GB” because I’m in the USA. In the end, you’ll get something like this:

mountvol y: /s
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bg-BG' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\cs-CZ' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\da-DK' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\de-DE' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\el-GR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\es-MX' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\et-EE' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\fi-FI' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\fr-CA' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\fr-FR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\hr-HR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\hu-HU' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\it-IT' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ja-JP' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ko-KR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\lt-LT' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\lv-LV' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\nb-NO' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\nl-NL' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\pl-PL' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\pt-BR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\pt-PT' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ro-RO' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ru-RU' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\sk-SK' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\sl-SI' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\sv-SE' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\tr-TR' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\uk-UA' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\zh-CN' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\zh-TW' -Recurse
Remove-Item 'Y:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\Fonts*.ttf'
mountvol y: /d

With luck, you can then run the normal install process.