Just hang on a minute, and next you’ll see the Shrink window: Then, find the drive you’d like to shrink (E: in the example here), right-click the partition, and choose Shrink Volume…

In the window that opens, click Disk Management in the left column. You can! Shrink a drive to free up space for linuxįirst, find the My Computer / Computer / This PC icon – either on the desktop, or in File Explorer (Win-E to open it). What if you could just use some nice feature in Windows to shrink your drive so that the linux installer would “just work”?

You resort to fancy software in Windows to free up empty space on your drive so that Ubuntu can install itself there.

You boot from the Ubuntu media, follow the simple instructions, but you don’t see your drive, and Ubuntu refuses to resize your Windows partitions for you.

You want to dual-boot between, say, Windows 10 and Ubuntu.

Sometimes, you need free space on your drive in order for the linux install (even Ubuntu) to be happy.įortunately, there is a very easy and built-in way to shrink a partition in all modern versions of Windows without any fancy software! You might also think that your linux installer will do everything for you automatically.Īs it turns out, neither of the above are always true! You might think that you need some kind of fancy partitioning software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Suite to free up disk space for the linux partitions. Let’s say you want to dual-boot between Windows and some flavor of linux.

Increase shrink space windows 10