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.
![image[1]](http://www.networknet.nl/apps/wp/wp-content/uploads/PowerShellHowtodeleteafilebasedonalistof_9916/image1.png "image[1]")
The following PowerShell script recipe will help you delete a remote file based on a list of computers stored in a text file. New PowerShell function will be created during the session which will be piped from the text file.
