Help my windows server root volume is full!
Ivan Versluis June 25th, 2008
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.
