When we upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, or from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012, we may get an error message saying there’s not enough free space on C Drive for upgrading, please free up some space before proceeding
The official guide has solutions on this, it recommends us to:
But, the thing is, those two official/general resolutions are actually not sufficient to get enough free space for upgrading, see the screenshots below
Clean up space function only free up 2.04M and disable page file gives up 2013MB (~2G) free space, apparently not enough for solving low disk space problem nor upgrading issue, we need at least 10GB free space for upgrading, make it up to 20G just in case
Get it from other drives, like D, E, or other partition on the same disk
The built-in tools like Disk Management and Diskpart.exe
(command prompt), also you can use third-party partition software, or some non-Microsoft disk management products, like Macrorit Partition Expert
You don’t have to use any partition manager software when you have unallocated space right after C Drive or feel OK to delete the continuous partition next to C Drive and make that area unallocated
Take Disk Management, for example, Extend Volume, this function requires continuous unallocated space and the file system of C Drive (or other partition you’d like to extend) to be NTFS. If there’s no unallocated space on the exact area and C Drive is FAT32, the Extend Volume will be grayed out
You can, of course, shrink a volume to create unallocated space, but when the position is not next to C Drive, the extend volume option would still be grayed out, you disk map may be looked like this:
(C Drive + D Drive + E Drive)
Now C Drive is in low disk space, D Drive medium, E Drive has plenty of free space, we run Disk Management, Shrink E Drive and get disk map like this:
(C Drive + D Drive + Smaller E Drive + unallocated space)
Then we right-click on C Drive and found Extend Volume Grayed out…
We can’t move unallocated space next to C Drive, Windows currently doesn’t support so, unless we delete D Drive we won’t be able to activate that function
The same requirements for the diskpart command tool
So, shrink a volume to create unallocated space for C Drive extending is not a solution
Flee free to ignore the partition software, we can extend C Drive in Disk Management like this:
You don’t have to use all the unallocated space for C Drive extending, in the extend volume wizard guide window, we can specify that to the desired size, then the rest of the unallocated space can be used to create D Drive again, so we right-click on the rest, and “Create Volume” on it to get D Drive back again, although it’s getting smaller, it should be enough from part of the data we backed up
No, not at all. I mean, Partition Expert is easy to use, you just need to follow the steps below to extend C Drive:
…Although it seems too much on the description, it actually takes few clicks, all the clicks may take seconds to complete.
Never mind, we do have an alternative plan: Partition Extender
Steps to extend C Drive in Partition Extender:
In Partition Extender, you don’t have to create unallocated space first, you just click on a drive, drag the handle, and it will automatically get free space from the partition right next to it
Try the demo below to extend C Drive, this works the same in Partition Extender
When there's unallocated space next to D Drive, Partition Expert first merge that and then take free space from D Drive if you keep on dragging the handle to extend in the resize window
No need to install, we have portable edition available, just download it and directly run it from the package, choose the 32-bit or 64-bit edition, if you’re not sure about which Windows version you’re running, click on the link to find it out
A simple task like partition extending, the small utility Partition Extender will be enough.
For daily disk partition managing job, we recommend Partition Expert, the alternative and powerful Disk Management alternative program
As for Data cleaning, we have Data Wiper to ensure data safe
And as for hard drive surface test, we get Disk Scanner to scan bad sectors
All of our programs have the portable edition and support both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows systems