“How to increase space in C drive without deleting data? Recently, a ‘low disk space‘ pop-out balloon keeps appearing in the Systray, warning me to extend C drive space. I can neither format the C drive nor delete other partitions as I have data saved on all the partitions. So how can I possibly increase C drive space without formatting or deleting partitions?”
On the Windows computer, the running speed of an operating system largely depends on the available free space in C drive. However, with the increasing number of installed software and its corresponding data storage on C drive, your system partition will run out of space, and your computer will have worse performance.
Usually, over 90% of users want to extend C drive space because the free space approached the threshold of 200MB, 80MB, and 50MB. You may have tried to delete the unnecessary files, uninstall programs, or clean up the recycle bin to get some spare room in the C drive. But these are only temporary fixes. It won’t be long before your C drive is full again. Then, how to increase space in C drive and completely solve the C drive low disk space problem? Read this tutorial in-depth.
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How to Increase Space in C Drive Windows 10 by Resizing Partition
To increase C drive space to speed up Windows 10, three solutions are practical: using EaseUS Partition Master, Windows Disk Management, and Command Prompt.
1. Increase C Drive Space Without Losing Data via EaseUS Partition Master
Being one of the most intelligent disk/partition management software, EaseUS Partition Master can extend C drive space in two ways.
- First, if you have unallocated space on the same hard disk as the C drive, you can opt for the “Resize/Move” feature to merge the free unallocated space with the C drive.
- Second, it doesn’t matter even you don’t have any unallocated space. You can simply use the “Allocate Space” to allocate some space from those non-system partitions to the system C drive without causing damage to saved data on your PC.
Step 1. Locate the Target Partition.
Go to Partition Manager, locate the target partition and select “Resize/Move”.
Step 2. Extend the Target Partition.
Drag the partition panel rightward or leftward to add the unallocated space into your current partition and click “OK” to confirm.
Extra Option: Get Space from Another Drive
If there is not enough unallocated space on your disk, right-click on a big partition with enough free space, select “Allocate space”.
Then select the target partition that you want to extend at the allocate space to column.
Step 3. Execute Operations to Extend Partition.
Drag the dots of the target partition into the unallocated space and click “OK”.
Then Click the “Execute Task” button and click “Apply” to keep all the changes.
Except for resizing partition, EaseUS Partition Master provides more one-stop disk partition features. For example, you can clone disk, merge adjacent and non-adjacent partitions, create/delete/format partition, wipe data, and convert disk/partition conversion (e.g., convert MBR to GPT).
2. Extend C Drive Space in Disk Management by Deleting Partition
Disk Management comes with Windows and has many functions to manage disks, including extend volume, shrink volume, format partition, delete partition, etc.. You can use the “Extend Volume” option for increasing C drive space if you don’t want to use the third-party EaseUS Partition Master to extend C drive.
Yet, there is a condition when extending C drive via Disk Management; that is, there needs to be some unallocated space very behind the C drive. Otherwise, the extend volume will be greyed out.
If there is no unallocated space, how to increase the space in C drive? We should first create unallocated space by deleting partitions and make sure it locates right behind C drive. Then, extend C drive with the unallocated space. Do it by following the guides below.
Next, we will show an example of how to increase C drive space by removing D drive, which is very behind C.
Step 1. Open Disk Management, right-click partition D, and choose “Delete Volume”. When the process finishes, we can see there is unallocated space and locates right behind C drive.
Step 2.Now, right-click on C drive and select “Extend Volume”. Extend Volume Wizard will pop up. Follow the on-screen guide to complete increasing C drive.
3. Increase Space in C Drive Using Command Prompt
If you are a computer expert, you can use the command lines to extend C drive. Otherwise, be careful to run these commands to make sure you can move more space to C drive without any extra issue, or use the automatic EaseUS partition manager to help you out.
If there is an adjacent unallocated space behind the system C drive, you can follow the steps below:
Step 1. Type diskpart in the Search Bar and hit enter.
Step 2. Input these commands orderly, and press Enter after each command line.
list disk
select disk n (n is the disk letter of your system hard disk)
list partition
select partition n (n is the drive letter of the system drive)
extend
exit
If there is no unallocated space right behind the system C: drive, follow the below steps:
Step 1. Type diskpart in the Search Bar and hit enter.
Step 2. Input the following commands one by one and press Enter after each command line.
list disk
select disk n
list partition
select partition n (n is the drive letter of the partition behind C drive)
delete partition
select partition m(m is the drive letter of system partition)
extend
exit
How to Increase C Drive Space Summary
This page covers all the effective solutions to increase C drive space in Windows 10/8/7. To optimize your hard disk and partition to enhance computer performance, we highly recommend you equip your computer with EaseUS Partition Master.
With this partition management tool, you can take full advantage of your disk space without effort by resizing, merging, creating, formatting, deleting, cloning, migrating, and converting partitions.