Clearing out WinSXS folder in Server Core VM

[rickjames]

Morning all. I've been labbing at home for MCSA and have currently have a 2012R2 Core VM stored on a 20GB VHD.

 

Naturally I've been playing around here and there and switching back and forth between GUI/Core and subsequently am now in the position where I've only 7GB or so left on my drive. I've removed any roles/features etc. Checking my WinSXS folder and obviously there's about 10gb of crap just sitting in there. All I've done so far is run the /StartComponentCleanup parameter of DISM, but that didn't appear to get rid of anything.

 

Is there something else I'm missing that I can do?

 

Cheers, all

[Arthur]

I've removed any roles/features etc.

Did you do that using Uninstall-WindowsFeature? e.g.

 

Get-WindowsFeature | Where { $_.InstallState -eq "Available" } | Uninstall-WindowsFeature  -Remove

Edited May 10, 2016 by Arthur

[Willott]

Found this yesterday when I was looking at a few bits, wonder if it will assist with this?

 

https://www.saotn.org/windows-server-2012-r2-disk-cleanup-dism/

[rickjames]

Did you do that using Uninstall-WindowsFeature? e.g.

 

Get-WindowsFeature | Where { $_.InstallState -eq "Available" } | Uninstall-WindowsFeature  -Remove

 

Yeah, ran through that.

 

As per below I'm gonna run /AnalyzeComponentStore tonight and see what it throws up

[rickjames]

To follow up; /analyzecomponentstore returned nothing to be removed either. VM in question wasn't doing particularly taxing so I've just reformatted the VHD it's on and created a new VM from scratch. Just installed Datacenter core and will leave it alone with changing to GUI etc

 

Thank God for labs...