HDD full? but its not?

Hi,

I have a server which has a 70gb c drive. now server 2003 is reporting the disk as full with only 17k left. but ive looked and there should be at least 30-35gb free. its a production server so i dont want to try any old tosh. i cant seem to see any hidden files etc which is taking up the space.

anyone got any experiance with this issue before? or a good free hdd analyser?

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Comments

Lee H

First Q. Is it partitioned?

dtlokee

Disk quota perhaps?

nel

its in a hardware array. the c drive is mirrored and the data drive is a raid 5 array.

nel

Disk quota perhaps?

Nope its not enabled.

nel

typically the server has not got the support tools so i cannot use diskuse either. and when i try to install them what does it say...DISK FULL !

iowatech

Do you have any new programs on there that might have their logging options enabled?

dynamik

Just to clarify, if you open up my computer, it tells you that you only have 17k out of 70gb, but when you start exploring the file system, you can't find what is taking up all your space?

Also, have you chosen to display hidden files and folders and system files?

Ahriakin

Turn down your Recycle Bin drive usage as that tends to remain hidden (along with the Filesystem tables, a huge amount of small files could drive that usage up). But first up run a checkdisk with all options enabled and let it reboot/check.

nel

Yes, thats correct. unless some files are not showing there true size

dynamik

I think the previous posts are the best starting points. Check your disk configurations on event logs, recycle bin, shadow copies for shared folders, paging file etc.

nel

ive checked all and all seem to be normal.

but still down to 17 k.

[/quote]

Turn down your Recycle Bin drive usage as that tends to remain hidden (along with the Filesystem tables, a huge amount of small files could drive that usage up). But first up run a checkdisk with all options enabled and let it reboot/check.

All seem fine. i cant reboot yet, i'll have to schedule one in.

JDMurray

nel wrote:

Yes, thats correct. unless some files are not showing there true size

Not to start waving a red flag, but a common stealth mechanism of computer viruses is to force the mis-reporting of the size of infect files. Do you periodically run a A/V and Malware scanner on this drive? Can you take the server off-line and boot it from a Linux LiveCD to check what the file information really looks like outside of Windows? (I'm assuming this problem is on a Windows server.)

Mrock4

I had an experience similar, where Exchange 03' had built up a log directory of about 390GB..it had (semi-encrypted) every e-mail sent for the past 15 months saved in it. The disk size issue was a big problem, because we were getting e-mails bouncing back from users. After I cleared out the log somewhat, starting with the oldest and working forward, it was OK.

theseman

JDMurray wrote:

nel wrote:

Yes, thats correct. unless some files are not showing there true size

Not to start waving a red flag, but a common stealth mechanism of computer viruses is to force the mis-reporting of the size of infect files. Do you periodically run a A/V and Malware scanner on this drive? Can you take the server off-line and boot it from a Linux LiveCD to check what the file information really looks like outside of Windows? (I'm assuming this problem is on a Windows server.)

Another possible explanation for this - If some files or folders are showing a size of 0, it might mean that you do not have permission to read it. So while the folders/files are taking up disk space, you wouldn't 'know' by going through the folder structure.

-Travis

ladiesman217

i have also experienced the same thing, and i found out that a trojan is sending ICMP request every second and it rapidly filled my firewall log reaching GB's in just few days.

Slowhand

Check to see if Windows is compressing your files. You have to remember, even if you compress everything down to a smaller size, Windows won't let you fill up that extra space. The free space is calculated based on uncompressed file size. Don't know if that's going to be the problem, but it's worth checking out.

nel

figured it out that the backup software was caching the backup (built up 60gb) and it did show a size of a few kb's but the file was locked so i had to use process explorer to unlock the file and then delete it because the server couldnt be restarted. all is ok now.