Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting

If you have ever installed any operating system in you pc or laptop by yourself, then you must be knowing that almost all folks install the OS in C: drive as it appears selected by default. Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting


Whilst  installing OS we usually forget to think about future. If your career is associated with computers, its less likely that you won’t require a bigger size of C drive in your pc.I got popup from the system about low disk space in C drive, where my windows 7 is installed and as its the Primary partition of the drive so I can not format it simply and also OS resides in the C: drive.


So I think of moving/extend my primary disk space by assigning some space from other local disk (suppose D drive) and add that extra space  to C drive without formatting the C drive.I have searched in Google “How to Increase C drive space without formatting” and found lots of links, gathered lot of information and installed various software’s like Acronis Disk Director 11 and others.




Acronis Disk Director is not available for free so I found an utility which is easy to use and proved a perfect  solution for me, called “Partition Assistant” by AOMEI. Its build for Windows Operating Systems like Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 32 /64 bit and the latest Windows 8 Developer Preview. I have not tried it in Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 but it should work OK with them as well.

Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting

After installing Partition Assistant I have increased C drive space without formatting my PC, just by moving extra space from D drive :-) Below are the steps which you can follow if you want add more space to your C drive from other available drives.


Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting


1) Install the downloaded software and Open it.


2) Decide the drive from which you want to move space to C driver, in my case my D drive was having maximum free space.

Right click on the drive from which you want to decrease the space.Click on Allocation Free Space.


Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting

3) ‘Allocate Free Space’ popup should open. Double check this (i.e. from: and to:) and click on OK button.
Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting

4) Click on ‘Apply’ and it will ask you to restart your machine, restart your machine.Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting5) Wait and watch, as you have to wait around half an hour depending on the size you intended to move :-)
Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting

Increase C: drive space in windows 7 without formatting

Question: How can I extend my primary partition (c drive size) in Windows 7? I have windows 7 installed in my C drive. I allocated 10 GB space to install the Operating System. Now there isn’t much space left in the drive. I cannot extend the partition space, is there anyway I could do this with out reinstalling the OS? I try Norton Partition Magic, but it didn’t work.



If you have more than one partition on the hard drive that Windows is installed on, you first need to ‘Shrink’ the partition immediately after the Windows partition. Windows ‘Disk Management’ can not shrink the beginning of a partition (only the end of a partition), so you need a third party utility to first shrink the non Windows partition and then ‘Extend’ the Windows partition into the “Unallocated” space created when you shrunk the front of non Windows partition.


Note: I suggest that you should backup all your files in an external drive before making any changes.

About AOMEI Partition AssistantPartition Assistant Home Edition is free multilingual disk partition manager for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 32 /64 bit and the latest Windows 8 Developer Preview.It support 7  languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.Main Capabilities:

  • Extend/Shrink partition

  • Resize/Move partition

  • Merge/Split partition

  • Allocate Free Space

  • Copy disk/partition

  • Create/delete/format partition

  • Set partition label

  • Wipe partition/wipe hard drive

  • Rebuild MBR

  • Convert to GPT/MBR disk

  • Disk surface test

  • View properties of partition and disk


Advanced Capabilities:

  • Change and Remove drive letter

  • Hide and Unhide drive

  • Convert Logical to Primary or contrary

  • Set drive as active

  • Convert FAT/FAT32 to NTFS

  • Check partition

  • Wipe unallocated space

  • Change partition type

  • Change serial number

  • Partition Alignment


Disk & Partition Wizard:

  • Extend Partition Wizard

  • Disk Copy Wizard

  • Partition Copy Wizard

  • Migrate OS to SSD or HDD

  • Partition Recovery Wizard

  • Create Bootable CD Wizard


On the other hand the home edition could also support for business, you could use it in your small company or help others solve partition problem.Let me know if you have any queries about this.

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