How to Solve C Drive Full After Windows 11 Update

Last Updated on April 19, 2022 by Rashid Hassan

Windows 11 needs users to keep more free space on the C drive than Windows 10. After you upgrade to Windows 11, in case something goes wrong, the Setup will duplicate the previous installation as part of the process. And you might regret the upgrade and want to roll back to the original setup, or Windows 11 has compatibility issues that you have to manually revert to a previous version.

Although the security function allows you to restore the original modifications and the copy of the data will be preserved even after the upgrade is complete, using up a lot of storage space (within the “Windows.old” folder), which may be an issue for devices with limited storage.

If your laptop or desktop computer runs out of space after the update, this post will offer you some ideas to reclaim some available space on your C drive.

See Also AOMEI Partition Assistant – Disk Partition Management Software Quick Review

3 ways to solve C drive is full after Windows 11 update

In this part, we’ll show 2 ways about how to remove unnecessary files to release space on C drive and 1 way to add more free space to C drive.

Remove files via Settings

Step 1. Open Settings.

Step 2. Click on “System”.

Step 3. Click on “Storage”.

Step 4. Click the “Temporary files” page on the right-side

Step 5. Clear all the preselected items (if applicable).

Step 6. Click the “Remove files” button.

When you finish the procedures, the previous installation files, as well as any additional temporary files you chose on the preferences page, will be deleted.

Delete files with Disk Cleanup

Step 1. Open “This PC”.

Step 2. Right click C drive and choose “Properties”.

Step 3. In “General” tab, click “Disk Clean-up”.

Step 4. Click “Clean up system files”.

Step 5. Find and tick “Previous Windows installations” option.

Step 6. Click the “OK” button.

When you finish the instructions, the folder containing the previous installation files will be erased from your computer, freeing up space on the main disk.

Allocate free space from other drive to C drive

If you only delete or remove some junk files, the available space might not release much. Those files may only give you 10GB of free space. To add more capacity to the C drive, another way is to allocate free space on the disk to the C drive.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is the best partition software that can save your C drive whose “Allocate Free Space” function can allocate free space from D or other drives to your C drive. If other data partitions possess sufficient space, why not share to the C drive?

This flexible Windows disk manager is fully compatible with Windows 11 and prior versions of Windows operating system. You may quickly convert the system drive to GPT for Windows 11 installation or create a portable Windows 11 USB to run Windows 11 on any PC.

Now, let’s focus on the C drive capacity issue.

Step 1. Right-click the partition from which you want to allocate free space and select “Allocate Free Space”.

Step 2. You will get a pop-up window. Type in the size of the free space which you want to split from the D drive and this free space will be directly added to the C drive.

Step 3. You can view “Pending Operations” on the sidebar in case of corrections and then click “Apply” on the toolbar to execute pending operations.

You can repeat the operation to share more space from other drives to C drive, or directly merge a hardly used partition to C drive to extend C drive capacity.

When you finish all adjustments, you can restart the PC to finish the task. After that, your C drive will possess a larger space.

To sum up

With these 3 ways, you don’t need to worry about C drive being full after Windows 11 Update. AOMEI Partition Assistant can fix many problems of Windows OS and make you organize your devices conveniently.

Besides the functions we’ve already mentioned in the post, this tool also has disk cloning, migrating OS, file system converter, etc. And it also offers the Server Edition for Server users.

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