Why can’t I free up more drive space?
QI’m trying to dual-boot Windows 10 and 11 on the same NVME drive, which has 700GB free from 1TB. I’ve tried shrinking the Windows 10 system drive to free up 500GB of space using Disk Management in Windows, but it’s adamant it can only free up to 100GB. That won’t be enough for my Windows 11 needs, so what should I do? James Pelton
AThe reason Disk Management can’t give you access to all the available space on the drive is that it doesn’t reboot Windows during the partitioning process. As a result, it’s unable to handle unmovable files such as page files. These usually sit near the end of the volume, keeping them out of the way of other file operations to prevent disks fragmenting. Windows judges available free space from where this last file ends.
You may get lucky and find that after a couple of reboots Windows rearranges the files in such a way as to allow the drive to be shrunk, but a quicker and easier option is to use a third-party partitioning tool, which reboots during the resizing process to bypass the issue of where files are stored on the drive. The reboot allows the files to be removed or rearranged as required to free up to 100 per cent of the reported available space.
One such tool is Paragon Partition Manager Community Edition (www. snipca.com/43749), which is free for personal use. On our test PC (a 230GB drive with 35GB free space – see screenshot), Paragon was able to shrink the partition by the full amount after Windows’ Disk Management tool claimed only 2.4GB could be freed up.