While I was stuck at home during this pandemic, I installed several games on my computer simultaneously to pass my leisure time. After installing three large games I found that the C drive of my computer is almost full and my computer is starting to get slow. The only two options I had open to fix this problem are either uninstalling my favorite games or increasing the size of my computer’s C drive. You have probably guessed that I went with the latter and today in this article I am going to show how to increase drive size without losing its data or without formatting it.
The method of increasing the drive size I am going to discuss here, you can use it to increase not only your computer’s C drive but also other drives as well. So, let us get started.
Table of Contents
A Little Heads-up Before We Start
You need to keep in mind that this process can not increase your overall hard disk space. That is impossible unless you change your hard disk with a larger one or add a disk-like SSD storage with your computer.
What we will be doing is we will take a chunk of free storage space from other drives of your computer that has free enough space to spare and add it to your desired drives and thus increasing the free space of it.
Requirements
To add free space to your desired hard disk drive partition you need to have a drive partition with that amount of free space to spare. You will also need a software named EaseUS partition master.
How to Increase the Drive Size Without Losing Any Data
To increase the drive size of your computers C drive or any other drive of your choice, follow these steps:
Step 1: First open your computer and open Windows Explorer and then go to This PC.
Step 2: From the left side pane of the windows screen, right-click on This PC and you will see an option named Manage at the top of the recently opened dialogue box. Click on Manage. A dialogue box with Computer Management will appear.
Step 3: Then from the pane situated at the right side of that dialogue box you will see a dropdown option named Storage. Click on the dropdown option Storage and you will see disk management under it. Click on Disk Management and you will be able to see all the drive partitions of the hard disk of your computer.
Step 4: Now select the partition volume from which you want to take the spare volume and add it to another drive. In my case, it is the D drive. I want to take the free space from my D drive and add it to my C drive.
Step 5: Now right-click on D drive and a dialogue box will appear, from that dialogue box click on Shrink volume and another dialogue box will appear asking you for how much volume you want to shrink (take).
Step 6: Click on the box that says “Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB”. The volume amount will be in megabytes so you need to do some calculation here. If you want to take suppose 10 GB of free space then you need to input 10 x 1024 = 10240 MB in that dialogue box. If you want to take n GB of space volume from that disk you need to input n x 1024 = 1024n MB in the dialogue box.
Step 7: After inputting the right amount of volume that you want to shrink or take from that drive click on Shrink from the bottom right side of that dialogue box. After that, you will see that a new unallocated volume of partition has appeared with the volume size that you have just entered in the previous step.
Now minimize the Disk Management window. Do not close it because we will need it after a few moments.
Step 8: Now install and open the EaseUS partition master software. A window will appear of this software that shows all of your drive partition along the recently freed volume.
Step 9: This is the most important of all steps. You can only add free unallocated volume to your desired drive if the unallocated space is on the right side of your target drive partition. In my case, the free unallocated space is on the right side of my D drive. I need to move it and bring it on the right side of my target drive or the C drive.
There is no free unallocated space right of my C drive (the drive I want to add it to). That is why I am using the EaseUS partition master software to move that free unallocated disk space and bring it to the right of my C drive.
To do this you need to move all the disk drive partitions that reside in between the target drive (for me it is the C drive) and the free unallocated disk volume.
To move a drive partition a step right, just right click on from the EaseUS home window and you will see an option Resize/Move partitions. Click on it and you will see a dialogue box will appear. Now drag that drive to the right from the top row of the dialogue box by holding the left mouse button. It will move a bit to the right. Then click OK from the bottom right side of the dialogue box.
It will take a few moments and then it will say that the task is complete. Now click OK and you will see that the free unallocated volume has moved at the left side of the disk partition that you have just moved using EaseUS.
Move all of the drives in this way until there is no drive between your target drive (for my case it is my C drive) and the free unallocated space. If you continue doing this you will find the free unallocated disk space at the right side of your target disk partition, for my case which is the C drive.
Step 10: Now open the Disk Management window again and now you should see that the unallocated disk space has moved at the right side of your C drive or your target drive.
Step 11: Once you find that free unallocated space at the right side of your target drive, right-click on the target drive and click Extend volume.
Step 12: A dialogue box will appear. Click Next. And another dialogue box will appear. See if it is adding the right amount of free space to the target drive. By default, it should add the same free space as the free unallocated disk space. So, if it is okay by default, then click Next. Then click Finish from the bottom right side of the dialogue box. And you will see that your C drive has increased in size.
That is how you increase the size of your computer disk drive without losing the data inside it. Hopefully, this will work for you. Have a great day.
