Friend can't install FFXIV: "Not enough free disk space"

[Zephirenth]

She manages to download the setup program just fine, but when she tries to run it, she receives the following error message:

"Not enough free disk space. Installation requires 2 GB of free space on the drive containing the My Documents folder."

The problem is her hard drive has 165 GB of free space.

She's running Windows 10. There is no "My Documents" folder, but there is a "Documents" folder. Would that have anything to do with the error, or could there be something else?

[PetiteMalFleur]

How big is her ram?

[worldofneil]

My Documents = Documents. It was just a name change Microsoft implemented with Windows 8 and newer, but yes it means that same folder.

So just to confirm, is the drive with 165GB free the same drive as where her Documents folder is located ?

[AnesthesiaBunny]

I'm having the same issues. If anyone can give any information on how to fix this, I'd be very appreciative.

[Ruri]

Its probably trying to install it on a Windows partition instead of the 165 GB hard drive. Are you sure they only have 1 hard drive/partition listed?

[Zephirenth]

Her computer has 4 GB of ram.

Documents is indeed on the same drive as the 165 GB. It's the only hard drive installed in her computer.

Will get back to you on the partitions question.

Edit: She only has one drive on her computer, and it's C:. I'll be honest, I'm not sure if that's the right answer to the partitions question. Let me know if it is or isn't.

[Raist]

Windows does some strange things sometimes. A few of the oddball scenarios I've seen with this type of message:

Run the installer with admin privileges. Problem apparently was more of an access issue than size. This can be tricky since some installers have an .MSI extension which doesn't have the right-click context menu to run as admin unless you create it manually. Can try "cheating" by launching from within an admin context: launch cmd prompt as admin and then CD to the folder and launch it, create a batch file that calls it and launch the batch file as admin, launch file explorer as an admine, etc.

Standalone installer was on a removable drive that either didn't have enough room for unpacking the files or it was otherwise unable to write to the drive (like a CD or DVD). The installer was set to unpack the temp files to the source drive instead of one of the Windows temporary locations. Copying the installer to the hard drive resolved it. Seen intermittent shorts in cables/connectors cause issues as well.

Installing from a network drive. Unreliable communications can cause all kinds of problems. Copied installer to local drive and no problems.

Shadowcopy failed because of limits set for system restore. Clearing old images (disk cleanup wizard) or adjusting the reserved space resolved it.

Swapfile misbehaving. Corruption in file or auto-sizing just went AWOL. Gotta love Windows brain farts sometimes. Change system to run with no swap file and reboot (or rename the file and reboot) and then configure static size for the file, 2 or 3 times the size of physical memory installed. Basically, wanting to create a fresh, static sized file to use.

Windows temp files out of hand. Tons of small files for things like web browser cache and such making a mess in the MFT and all. Clean up temp files (disk cleanup wizard or a tool like ccleaner can streamline it some) and the run chkdsk /f on the drive to repair file system errors. Sometimes the /r switch was warranted as there were bad sectors.