difficulty installing windows 11

Question

kind of a long story, bear with me please. so i have an asus notebook from 2020 that was originally my now deceased mom's laptop. ive been trying for about 6 months to install windows 11 but it hasn't installed due to storage issues. the thing is, i have literally nothing installed or downloaded on the computer that could clear space. the only things that i could are a couple of corrupted files my mom wrote that i read might be viewable when i update to windows 11?? i cant transfer them off the computer because they're currently broken. i dont want to perform a hard reset and lose them yknow? the things taking up space on it are the update itself (23.9gb out of the 60 gb drive), the system reserved (22.3gb), and apps and features it won't let me uninstall (5.07gb). the laptop itself runs fast enough but microsoft edge is broken, powershell is broken and every time i use the laptop for more than an hour, i get a message that the update failed to install which has been interrupting telehealth sessions and meetings. is there anything i can do to update it without factory reseting the device? ive run disk clean up and storage sense, deleted temp folder and every trick i could find online to clear space but it's still happening. thank you! also please let me know if i used the tags wrong, im not confident if i should put it as an issue with windows 10 or 11

Answer 1

Hello Fen,

Thanks for reaching out. It sounds like your real worry isn't really Windows 11 itself — it's making sure your mother's files don't get lost while you try to get this PC working again. Let me try to address that first.

• Corrupted files can almost always still be copied off a drive, even if they won't open properly. Corruption usually affects how the file is read, not whether the bytes can be moved. So, getting them onto a USB stick or OneDrive first is realistic, and it removes the risk from anything you do to the PC afterwards.
• Upgrading to Windows 11 won't repair those files — Win11 and Win10 read files the same way, so the upgrade itself isn't going to recover anything that's damaged. If file repair is the goal, that's a separate conversation and depends on the file types.
• On the upgrade itself, a 60GB drive is technically below Windows 11's 64GB minimum, and the 22GB "System Reserved" figure you mentioned looks abnormal (it's usually only a few hundred MB). That combination makes an in-place upgrade unlikely to complete cleanly, and it may also be part of why updates keep failing.

So, the path I'd suggest, in order:

• Copy mom's files (corrupted or not) onto a USB stick or to OneDrive — that way they're safe no matter what.
• Once they're backed up, you have options: a clean install of Windows 11 (follow this guide https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2338451/how-to-make-clean-install-of-windows-11-article) which would also fix the weird partition layout, or just staying on Windows 10 if the PC is otherwise fine for her day-to-day use.
• If you want to try recovering the corrupted files themselves, share a few examples of what they are (Word docs, photos, etc.) and we can look at that separately.