How to Shrink a Volume in Windows 10

Editorial StaffLast Updated: January 1, 2021

On new laptops with preloaded Windows, you will mostly find single volume occupying full Hard Disk space. So, you may only have ‘C‘ drive (Windows drive) and no other volumes. However, you can shrink existing volume in Windows 10 and create a new volume using freed up space.

But remember, you can only shrink free space left in your disk drive otherwise, there may be a data loss. For example, if your C drive is of 500 GB with 300 GB used and 200 GB free space, you can shrink only up to 200 GB of your C drive space. And shrinking more than that will cause data loss.

One more important thing before we start. The data in HDD is not aligned systematically. The data get scattered in HDD disc over the time. So, we recommend you to run defragmentation first.

How to Shrink a Volume in Windows 10 to Free up Space

In this tutorial we are going to explain how to shrink a disk drive (volume) in Windows 10 to free up some space. And this same process works for Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 as well.

Step 1

First of all, open Computer Management. Right click on ‘My Computer‘ or ‘This PC‘ icon and choose ‘Manage‘. Alternatively, you can also type compmgmt.msc in RUN and press ENTER. And this will open Computer Management utility.

Open RUN, type compmgmt.msc and press Enter

In Computer Management, on the left side, click on ‘Disk Management‘ to manage local disk drives.

In Computer Management, go to Disk Management

Above screenshot shows that this PC has only one disk drive (C:) of 31GB but there are no other volumes. So, we will shrink some of this drive’s space to free up space for another disk drive.

Step 2

Right click on the drive that you want to shrink (Drive C in our case) and select ‘Shrink Volume…‘

Right click on C drive and select Shrink Volume

This will open Shrink drive dialog box where you can enter the amount of the space to shrink from this drive.

Step 3

New Shrink Volume window will open showing selected volume’s details. Enter the amount of space to shrink (in MB) and click on ‘Shrink‘ to shrink entered amount of the space from selected disk drive (C). So, in this example we have entered 5120MB (=5GB) space to shrink.

Step 4

Go back to ‘Disk Management‘ and check available disk space. Here, you can see the space of the existing volume has been shrunk. And you can see unallocated space equal to shrunken size in your disk. You can use this unallocated space to create new volume.

New unallocated space created after shrinking a volume

Shrink a Volume and Free up Space in Windows 10

Above tutorial explained, how you can easily shrink existing volume in Windows to free up space for creating a new volume. You can either create a new volume from unallocated space using or you can also use it for installing other Operating systems.

Hope you liked the tutorial. Feel free to share your queries and suggestions in the comment section down below.

How to Shrink a Volume in Windows 10