HELP! Surface RT acting very strangely...also, where has all my storage space gone???

[mrbrianlee]

Hi All,

Wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar to my current predicament.

I fired up my Surface RT (32GB) and noticed that the Skype app and the Games app had disappeared from my Start Screen (leaving gaps in tile arrangement).

Also noticed that the Travel tile was now called "AppexTravel"...and would not open.

Thought I would go in to the Windows Store and reinstall the missing apps. However I get the "We weren't able to connect to the Store" message (internet is working fine, other apps are working fine).

Time for a PC Refresh I thought. However it tells me that I need 3GB more free space before I can do this???

I check my free space and find that I have only 1.9GB out of 27GB free. Window store apps take up 4.87GB. Media and Files in total take up less than 1GB. Where has all my storage space gone? (I have most of my media on a microSD card).

Completely stuck at this point? Can anyone help? :unhappysweat:

Many thanks.

 

[broughshane]

Never had troubleshooting with what your saying about the apps now but give your surface a basic restart from the power button setting first before you try a refresh.. also check you have all the latest updates.

 

[mrbrianlee]

Restart tried with no success. Fully up to date with updates. :unhappy:

 

[broughshane]

try first from the desktop, a disc clean up. I don't think this will help find much of the missing space. But it will give you a rough idea on space and the use ( there is a lot of this took up over time with updates from MS ) then go with a refresh. It could even come to a full reset which is a real pain in the **** or hardware problem in which you may need to return the tablet.

 

[mrbrianlee]

Did the Disk Clean and saved 88MB.

My problem is that I can't actually do a refresh because it is saying I need to free up 3GB more disk space before I can start the refresh?!?!?

 

[johnny77777]

Similar issue. Used to have a Surface RT, now using 2520 w/ RT.

Says I have less than 3Gb of space left, yet I have hardly any apps installed that are taking significant space, I have my entire OneDrive content set to be available online only and I don't store any videos, music or images on the tablet itself. Although I do have access to my video library via my homegroup on my home network -- shouldn't affect storage space on tablet though.

I'm wondering is some of my old RT settings from previous surface have carried over somewhere here and are taking up storage space.

No idea what has happened to all the storage space.

 

[bulls96]

Do you have file history enabled? I find that takes up a lot of space in mine since it saves it to the native drive until you connect your external drive for backup.

Sent from my Surface Pro 3 using Tapatalk

 

[johnny77777]

At least for me, file history is disabled already.

 

[dpaynewp]

I know this sounds a bit drastic, but couldn't you uninstall as many apps as needed in order to do the refresh and then just reinstall?

 

[mrbrianlee]

I ended up finding this thread on Microsoft's forums (answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfwinrt-surfusing/surface-rt-disk-space-decreasing-for-no-reasons/73e24f89-cf82-4621-af85-d09d4bc6a760) which seemed to indicate a hardware issue to be the root cause.

Spent some time with a MS online help agent who confirmed it as a hardware issue. Went down to my local Microsoft store where they processed an immediate exchange. All-in-all an excellent customer service experience :smile:

Hope this helps some of the others out there with this problem.