How to update iOS with limited hard drive space?

Question

A friend of mine is trying to update her iphone OS through itune but it always fails as she has only 1GB free space left on partition C, and it seems that iTune is using it as temporary space.

She's asking for help but I don't really know what I can do except using another computer with more free space to do the update. Is there a way to download iOS manually so we can store it on another partition instead of using up all space on partition C? Or is there any simpler way to do it?

Answer 1

A conventional spinning hard drive on a computer needs to have at least 15% free space for optimal operation. If a spinning hard drive has less than 15% free space, the entire computer system will run slower than it should, due to a phenomenon called disk fragmentation.

Your friend will do herself a favor if she buys a larger hard drive and pays a technician to install it and clone the contents of her older, smaller hard drive to her newer, larger hard drive. Then she will not only have a faster computer system, she will also have plenty of room for iTunes and the iOS upgrade.

Large hard drives are ridiculously cheap.

That being said, there are many things that can be done to clean out un-needed files from the existing hard drive to free up more space. Start by running the free CCleaner program.

Then free up space on the disk by deleting all but the last Windows System Restore Point. Do a Google search for instructions on that.

Answer 2

Same problem, i have TBs of free space on my other drives but limited space on my C: which is a ssd drive.

the quick solution for me was to remove previous backups of my phone on itunes which allowed me to free enough space to back up again for the update.

Answer 3

While I agree with Wheat Williams, if there is any urgency as to the upgrade, you could always try this alternative:

http://www.felixbruns.de/iPod/firmware/ << download your iOS version from here and put it on an external thumb drive (assuming you have one of those lying around)

Run CCleaner to free up as much space as possible, then reboot to clear anything that doesn't need to be running. On reboot, close as many programs as possible (assuming windows, including notifications area apps) and run iTunes.

Plug in the device and ALT+CLICK on the upgrade software button when taken to the summary screen. This will let you select your own software to install, and hopefully will let you do it from a thumb drive.

I've never tried it, but hope it helps.

EDIT - the link above will give you a complete list of iOS versions, answering your question better than what I just wrote - and will therefore allow you to download it outside of iTunes.