C: drive full... or is it?

[elsiegee40]

I've had a heart-stopping hour or so here with one of my servers (Server 2003 R2) proclaiming there was no free space on C:

A quick check revealed it was true. Running disk cleanup and clearing the desktop freed 100Meg (wow!)

The page file is on C: so I decided to move it which would at least free the 1.5GB it was using.

Page file moved, server rebooted... 7.5 GB free!

What on earth might have been using the other 6GB? Any ideas please?

[Hightower]

One thing (not sure if a reboot would have helped) that might cause it is AV defs. With Symantec ours always downloaded to the C: and never cleaned themselves up - every couple of months we had to delete the update files taking up about 4GB

[elsiegee40]

Well we have Symantec, so that's a possibility to be investigated.

[Dom_]

Are you using shadow copies? iirc in 2003 it clears all copies on reboot, so probably that?

[Gibbo]

Old print jobs perhaps?

[elsiegee40]

Everything, including Suymantec, is installed on the other partition, except Server 2003 itself. We do use shadow copy, will look at where that's doing its stuff.

@Gibbo you may be onto something. There were two failed pre-school photograph print jobs on the print queue... which I deleted. I wonder what they were.. preschool + photographs = far too many giga bytes usually.

[TechSupp]

Ah the old favourite chestnut, large spool files created by people printing high res photographs on to plain paper, probably using the photo wizard, which crash the server due to zero free space...been there last year.
While I'm moaning, have you moved the spool file location away from the c: drive? Thats what I did now I dont care what they print, thats admins lookout for costs, at least my server does not go down now :-)

[elsiegee40]

Ah the old favourite chestnut, large spool files created by people printing high res photographs on to plain paper, probably using the photo wizard, which crash the server due to zero free space...been there last year.

That's it exactly. Two failed jobs in the queue both printing photos using photo wizard!

I'm not on site now, but have telephoned the Bursar and sent her to do some digging in Pre-School. Bursar is suitably irate that this department is the the likely cause... shame I'm not there really; I could quite enjoy this encounter

[elsiegee40]

I've just remoted in and tightened up the size of print jobs allowed in Print Manager Plus too. I will investigate moving the spool

[Gibbo]

Yep, this happened once to us. I moved the print spooler cache to another drive.