Andi Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 One of my DCs is currently down to 400MB on it's C drive! I'm getting pretty worried about this. What are the best options I have of increasing the partition? It's only 10GB at the moment. Partition Magic? Rebuild?
FN-GM Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 I would ghost the server change the hard drive with something larger and then download the image to the new drive. Z
mattx Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 How about moving the swap file over to a different partition ?
tech-man Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 OK I had this issue on my servers - I used BootIt to re-size the partitions - this worked really really well, no issues. In my servers I have two mirrored boot drives, I pulled one of these out, did the re-size when I was sure all was OK I put the other disk back in and it re-built You do this at your own risk, always allowing for current backups and recovery in the event of a failure of the process.
JamesC Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 It is not possible to resize the system os partition in windows using the standard diskpart tool. BUT A third party app can be used. I Highly recommend Acronis Disk Director or Partition magic. If you have space on the disk then resizing would solve the problem. You can move the paging file but why fix it if its not broke?
contink Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 You can also run the system tool to reclaim and compress old files.. I had a slew of winupdates, logs, etc... that were taking up over 1gb of space on one DC hard drive recently so that's always worth checking too.. That said, I'd still go for a ghost backup and clone the drive to a new bigger one as I'd assume you're already using the space in the other partitions. 1
kestrel1 Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 You cannot use Partition Magic to resize a server OS partition. You need the server version which is called Volume Manager. I don't think this is available since Symantec got hold of PowerQuest. Never tried Acronis Disk Director to resize a server OS drive, but it may work. I had a similar issue & found that the backup catalogues where taking up a large amount of drive space (over 1.5gb). I removed the old catalogues & freed up the space on the drive.
john Posted January 19, 2008 Posted January 19, 2008 I can say Acronis stuff is magical, using it myself and very pleased with it
Andi Posted January 21, 2008 Author Posted January 21, 2008 Cheers for all the advice guys. I've used Acronis at home and liked it so I may go for that here. It's nerve wracking but full backups are always done so shouldn't be a massive issue. Ghosting is not an option as the C drive is part of a RAID array so not a matter of just physically removing the disk. Good call on the windows update files. I imagine there's quite a few of them.
Andi Posted January 21, 2008 Author Posted January 21, 2008 Is it a good idea to compress old files on a DC? If so, what parameters? The default is 50 days. I'd gain 2GB doing this, but as usual a bit nervous about it cocking something else up.
contink Posted January 21, 2008 Posted January 21, 2008 Is it a good idea to compress old files on a DC? If so, what parameters? The default is 50 days. I'd gain 2GB doing this, but as usual a bit nervous about it cocking something else up. Well, if it helps... I did it last week and it just went ahead without any problems... The usual caveat of backup first applies but it worked fine for me
Andi Posted January 21, 2008 Author Posted January 21, 2008 OK, I'll go for it and blame you if it fails
contink Posted January 21, 2008 Posted January 21, 2008 OK, I'll go for it and blame you if it fails *checks job description*.... Yep that's in there 1
Andi Posted January 21, 2008 Author Posted January 21, 2008 Compressing was no probs and I now have 2GB of space. Thanks contink (I can't find how to thank you forum style).
boomam Posted February 5, 2008 Posted February 5, 2008 Bit of a daft question, but can DC's even be ghosted? I remember getting told a while back that ghosting a DC then restoring it, even on the same or identical hardware, causes lots of problems. Or is that all rubbish? .
sahmeepee Posted February 5, 2008 Posted February 5, 2008 @boomam: If you have another DC running, then any changes made to AD whilst the iffy DC is offline should be replicated without problems when it comes back up. It's only like turning it off and on again really. The danger comes when you restore a DC to its original state MUCH later (longer than the tombstone lifetime). That can cause problems because the iffy DC will show objects which have been deleted ages ago as still existing and the good DC will believe it, because by that time the good DC will have removed all records of the objects ever existing.
boomam Posted February 6, 2008 Posted February 6, 2008 @boomam: If you have another DC running, then any changes made to AD whilst the iffy DC is offline should be replicated without problems when it comes back up. It's only like turning it off and on again really. The danger comes when you restore a DC to its original state MUCH later (longer than the tombstone lifetime). That can cause problems because the iffy DC will show objects which have been deleted ages ago as still existing and the good DC will believe it, because by that time the good DC will have removed all records of the objects ever existing. What if theres just the one DC then? ATM, we have just one DC. If i was to ghost it to one of our NAS's for example, i take it that the restore would work fine? Cant remember where i read about the DC ghosting problem tbh, as i never thought it made sence. .
sparkeh Posted February 6, 2008 Posted February 6, 2008 (edited) I am also suffering from this (inherited) problem. Our win 2003 server has a 700gb disk that is partitioned into: C: for the OS ~ 9gb D: shared area for data ~ 691 gb We are desperately short on space on c: and, as d: has 100s of gigs of free space, need to extend c: by taking some of d: As stated above I could use something the Acronis server tools but was wondering what would happen if I did the following: As d: is only data I could copy this to an external device. Delete the d: partition and extend c: into the unallocated space, recreate d: in some of the remaining space (leaving some for future expansion of either drive) and copy back the data. Would this work or am I setting up problems for myself? EDIT: just realised you cant extend system partition - ignore me Edited February 6, 2008 by sparkeh
sahmeepee Posted February 6, 2008 Posted February 6, 2008 What if theres just the one DC then? ATM, we have just one DC. If i was to ghost it to one of our NAS's for example, i take it that the restore would work fine? If you want to ghost it onto different hardware, you will have all the same problems you would have normally doing that. If you just mean you want to dump the ghost image of C onto a NAS for storage then put it back onto a bigger disk in the same hardware it should (in theory!) work. With one DC in a standalone domain you should have no problems with replication. Nobody will be able to log in while the DC's offline though!
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