How to Easily Increase C Drive Space in Windows 11 (3 Ways)

Why Increase C Drive Space in Windows 11?

After the release of Windows 11, many people downloaded and installed the new system, but users also reported many problems during use. One of the most common problems is the lack of space on the Windows 11 C drive. There are many reasons for this problem, and this article summarizes the most common reasons for you.

• The operating system is infected by a virus or malware, creating unnecessary files and filling up storage space.
• Windows system update files are too many to fill the C drive.
• You have installed too many software and programs in the C drive.
• Too much user data, including photos, videos and music are saved on the desktop belonging to the C drive.

How to Increase C Drive Space in Windows 11

After understanding the reasons, next, this article will introduce three ways to expand the C drive in Windows 11 in turn. You can use Windows Disk Management, Diskpart, or professional disk cloning software to achieve your goals. Each method includes detailed graphic tutorials. You can read on to learn how to easily increase C drive space in Windows 11.

Method 1. Increase C Drive Space in Windows 11 by Disk Management

The first method is that you can use Windows' built-in tool Disk Management to help you increase the space on the C drive. You can follow the steps below.

Step 1. Select, right-click on This PC on the desktop and click on Manage.

Step 2. Click Storage > Disk Management.

Step 3. If there’s unallocated space next to the C drive, you can select the C drive, right-click on it, and select Extend Volume. Follow the onscreen guide to finish the rest steps.

Step 4. If there’s no unallocated space next to the C drive, delete the partition next to the C drive to create a piece of unallocated space, and then, execute the extension.

Note: You need contiguous unallocated space when using Disk Management to extend C drive. What’s more, this program only supports extending and shrinking volumes in NTFS or RAW.

Method 2. Increase C Drive Space in Windows 11 by Diskpart

In addition to the first method, you can also use Diskpart, a command-line disk partitioning tool included with Windows, to learn how to increase windows drive space. You can follow the steps below.

Step 1. Press Win + R together to open the Run window, type diskpart and hit Enter to activate DiskPart.

Step 2. Type list volume and press Enter to list all partitions on your computer.

Step 3. Type select volume and hit Enter to select the C drive.

Note: “*” represents the sequence number of the C drive.

Step 4. Type extend[size=n] to extent volume by the size of n.

DiskPart is a powerful program in Windows 11. However, those command lines are a little bit complex for green hands and meanwhile, to extend the C drive with DiskPart, unallocated space is also required.

Method 3. Increase C Drive Space in Windows 11 by Disk Cloning Software

The two methods mentioned above can help you extend C drive, but both require unallocated space on the disk to operate. If your disk has no unallocated space or you want to know how to increase C drive space in Windows 11 without formatting, you can use professional disk cloning software AOMEI Backupper Professional to help you clone C drive to a larger disk. This makes it easy to expand the C drive without deleting anything. This software also has the following advantages:

• Secure boot: After cloning, you can successfully boot computer from the cloned disk.
• Intelligent clone: By default, this feature will only clone the used sectors on the source disk, so that you can clone a larger drive to a smaller drive if you need.
• Sector by sector clone: When target disk is the same as or larger than the source disk, you can use this feature to clone all sectors on the source disk whether they are used or not.

Then you can download and install the software of the trial version, if you are a Windows Server user, you can pick AOMEI Backupper Server.

Step 1. Open the AOMEI Backupper Professional, click Clone > System Clone.

Step 2. The system-related partitions are selected by default. You need to select the connected disk as the destination location to clone your C drive to.

Step 3. If your target disk is an SSD, you can tick SSD Alignment to make the reading and writing speed faster. Confirm your operations and click Start Clone.

Notes:

• Sector by sector clone: If your target drive is equal to or larger than the source drive, you can tick the Sector by sector clone option, which will clone all sectors whether they are used or not.
• Make full use of disk space: It can add unallocated space to system partition to maximize the use of space on the target partition.

Summary

This article explains why to increase C drive space in Windows 11. When you want to expand the space of the C drive, you can use the 3 methods mentioned in the article to help you achieve the goal. If you choose to use the Disk Management and Diskpart tools that come with Windows, you need to have unallocated space on the disk.

If you have no unallocated space and don't want to delete any data or format the disk, then you can clone the system to a larger disk with the professional disk cloning software AOMEI Backupper Professional. After cloning, you can boot your computer directly from the cloned disk.

In addition, this software also provides functions such as Disk Clone and Partition Clone to meet your different cloning needs. You can download this software to explore more useful functions.