Windows 10 Extend C Drive

When you have used your system for a long time, you may come across a problem - there is no free space in the C drive (system partition), and hardware upgrades aren’t an option, what are you going to do? How to extend C drive or system partition in Windows 10?

Tips to Extend C Drive in Windows 10

There are a few things you can do in these cases to extend C drive or system partition. These include:

  • Move the print spooler and page file to another drive.
  • You can also merge other partition into C drive for more space.
  • Uninstall programms and clear temp files.

A combination of these things will allow you to free up a significant amount of space on your C drive.

Disk Management Tool in Windows 10

When troubled by the problem mentioned above, how can you do to extend C drive in Windows 10 to improve low disk space issue? When it comes to what’s the way you should use, Disk Management in Windows 10 may be the most popular method chosen by users. Windows 10 include a built-in functionality in Disk Management to shrink and expand partitions. No more 3rd party utilities needed! It’s worth nothing that many third-party utilities will be more feature-rich, but you can do the very basic stuff in Windows without adding anything new.

To get to this utility, open up Control Panel, and type in partition into the search box. In Windows 10, just use the Start Menu or the Control Panel search.

Shrink Partition in Windows 10

In the Disk Management screen, just right-click on the partition that you want to shrink, and select “Shrink Volume” from the menu.

In the Shrink dialog, you will want to enter the amount you want to shrink by, not the new size. For example, if you want to shrink your 50gb partition by roughly 10gb so that it will now be roughly 40gb, enter 10000 into the box:

Extend Partition in Windows 10

In the Disk Management screen, just right-click on the partition that you want to shrink, and select “Extend Volume” from the menu.

On this screen, you can specify the amount that you want to increase the partition by. In this case, I’m going to extend it back to the roughly 50GB size that it was before. Note that the extend partition feature only works with contiguous space.

However, Extend Volume function is not always available for all disk partitions or volumes. Sometimes, when you want to expand a partition or volume, you may notice that the Extend Volume option is grayed out and disabled, effectively prevents the disk partition to be expanded in size.

The only workaround to expand the partition or volume is this case is by using third-party partition editor which has more advanced features. Luckily there is many disk partitioning utilities that are available for free, and can perform the extending of partition on the fly without the need of reboot or boot from CD.

Here’s a few free disk partitioning software available:

  • MiniTool Partition Wizard
  • EaseUS Partition Master
  • Paragon Partition Manager
  • GParted (Live CD image requires reboot)

MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition (free)

As you probably know, Partition Wizard is the best free software out there to manage hard drives in Windows operating system. Even though it’s not as popular as some other similar tools, it’s definitely better than all other free partitioning tools out there.

The main advantage of this tool over Windows Disk Management is that Partition Wizard lets you extend your system partition even if you don’t have unallocated space on the right of your system partition in the partition table. It lets you extend the system partition by taking required free space from a partition that has enough disk space.

  1. Download Partition Wizard Home edition software. It’s completely free and supports both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Run the setup file and then follow the simple on-screen instructions to install it on your PC.
  2. Close all other programs and launch Partition Wizard software. On the welcome screen, click MiniTool Partition Wizard tile to launch the same.
  3. Right-click on the system drive and then click Extend option to open Extend Partition dialog.
  4. Here, select a partition from where you would like to take the free space from (the partition must have free space!), specify the amount of disk space that you would like to add to your system drive by moving the slider, and then click OK button.
  5. Finally, click Apply button and click Yes button when you see the confirmation dialog box to begin extending the system partition.

Note that Partition Wizard might ask you restart the PC to extend the system partition. When asked, restart your PC to complete the job. Hope this helps!