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This morning my Cacti appliance warned me by email that the windows root volume was getting above the 90% threshold. I configured this a while ago for getting notified in front.

When installing and configuring this Windows server I didn’t plan the configuration in the right way and my free space for C:\ volume is limited. If you install a fresh server again think about having one volume using the complete physical RAID disk space and not having one 18GB disk as I used now. My main problem is that server has 4GB of RAM and paging file is sitting on C:\.

I was not able to move the paging file nor could I  move the production virtual machine another volume. I went to C:\Windows and found a lot of blue directories which were used by the Automatic Updates. It used more than 500MB.

To safely remove Hotfix Backup files and the Add/Remove Programs Registry entries go to here and download the tool. Run the tool and remove all hotfixe backup files.

After you run the tool; go to c:\Windows and delete all blue marked directories. They all should start with $ sign.

Now we have on directory we need have closer look. Mine on this particular server grow to 600+ mb. Go to C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download and verify your size.

Stop the “Automatic Updates” service or run “net stop wuauserv” from cmd.

Delete all subfolders within C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download. Restart the “Automatic Updates”  service. You can safely remote these. The procedure can be executed on a Windows XP or a Windows Server 2003 system.