Hard Drive Displaying Incorrect Disk Usage

[jmoberg]

I have a hard drive on Windows Server 2003 R2 machine that is displaying the incorrect disk usage. The C: drive itself shows that it is completely full, but if I select everything within the drive or use a scanning tool to scan the folders it shows that there should be about 35 GB free. I do not have any files hidden, but I cannot seem to figure out why the drive is showing as full. Any suggestions as to what can be done would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I do not have any files hidden, but I cannot seem to figure out why the drive is showing as full.

No hidden files? How about the pagefile or the hibernation file? Also, all the system restore points? If you don't use hibernation, turn it off. This will remove the hibernation file which is usually the size of the installed ram in the system. Disk cleanup has an advanced tab where you can delete all but the last system restore point. You can also change the amount of disk space reserved for a page file and system restore points.

 

[jmoberg]

No hidden files, the page file is accounted for. There are no system restore points and no hibernation files.

 

[Hawkeye22]

How about all your windows update uninstalls? They are in you windows folder and start with $NTUninstall. Just be warned that if you delete thes you will be unable to uninstall that particular winows update. You didn't mention your OS, but if it's XP and you've had it a while, there will be lots of them.

 

[jmoberg]

I did mention the OS, it is Windows Server 2003. Also, the missing used space is now showing up within any individual folder so the issue is a bit bigger than just having some left over files. Whatever is taking up the space is not showing up anywhere except for the total on the C: drive.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Doh, sorry. I see you did list the OS. There may still be uninstall files you can remove from the windows folder.

You can also try windirstat which gives a great graphical display that shows where your space is being taken up. Perhaps it can help you.

http://windirstat.info/

 

[jmoberg]

I ran windirstat and it shows the C: drive as only having 10.3 GB worth of data on it. The drive itself is 50 GB and it displaying as being full within My Computer. I have no idea how the rest of the drive is showing up as being full.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Well, other than running chkdsk c: /f I'm not sure what else to check, unless you've got some malware hiding on the system.

 

[jmoberg]

I am planning on running chkdsk tonight and was about to run a scan for Malware. Hopefully one of them turns something up because I am stumped. Thank you for your assistance!

 

[rgd1101]

It the shadow copies enable?

 

[Hawkeye22]

It the shadow copies enable?

I mentioned that in my first post.

 

[jmoberg]

So the chkdsk ran last night, but it did not clear up any space. The spyware scan also did not find anything. Also, shadow copies are not enabled. Any other ideas?

 

[tpjaper]

Try looking in C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles. You have to check each folder as the size is reported as zero.

These files do not appear to be reported in disk usage in windows explorer. They can be deleted. I recently claimed 9gb from deleting these files.

 

[jmoberg]

I recently resolved this issue and wanted to let everyone know what I found. The server that was having the problem is a web server and we user SmarterMail to host email. SmarterMail has AV software built in called ClamAV. This was producing several hundred temp folders a day that added up to a few Gigabytes each day. These folders were not showing up because the permissions were set so no actual user had rights to the folders. I had to force a change of the owner on all of the folders, edit the permissions and then delete the temp folder. I am working with SmarterMail to figure out why this is happening and in the mean time have a batch file setup to remove remove the folders every four hours. Thank you for all of the suggestions!