DC C: Drive almost full

[Ambient]

Hi

 

Due to the former ICT Manager of this school, the C: drive of our Domain Controller now only has 1GB of space!

 

When I took over here, this DC in question had a huge role. It used to host home folders, shared areas...even RIS!!! (As well as performing its duty as one of 2 active directory servers)

 

Now, all the roles have been taken away from this server apart from it being a domain controller. This has left me with loads of space on the other partitions...but, the C: Drive has remained the same size (as nothing has been un-installed from it)

 

My question is this...how would you go about correcting this issue? Would you use disk partitioning software to merge the partitions? As it’s on a server (and the main DC at that), would you have the confidence to do this?

 

I've already deleted loads of un-needed stuff form the Windows folder in order to save whatever space I can...but I’m at the limit as to what I can remove now.

 

All ideas welcome.

 

Thanks

Aaron

[glennda]

I would ensure you have a full back up of the dc and then try. or if you have any virtual host's create a new vm and then just promote this one and demote the old one.

 

Toby

[adamchapman]

I'm in the same boat - but it's not the previous netman's fault..

 

less than 500MB available on most servers!!! When setup, the C partition was only 10GB

[soveryapt]

You could make another DC the PDC and then, if all the roles are removed from this server, do a dcpromo to remove the server from the role of DC allowing you to reformat / partition the hard-drive .. I certainly wouldn't go messing with the file tables and repartitioning with it as an active DC ..

 

This article should help with the transfer if you're unsure .. How to view and transfer FSMO roles in Windows Server 2003

 

EDIT:

Just make sure one of your other machines runs the Global Catalogue too before you do demote it! - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313994

[adamchapman]

I did manage to find an old version of Partition magic that would have worked.

But I haven't been brave enough yet to give it a go

[IrritableTech]

I had the same trouble when I started here. I made sure I had a good backup and used PMagic to resize the partitions on two servers. One worked perfectly, the other didn't and I had to restore my dc.

[speckytecky]

Not only me had / have this problem then!

 

Seems to be a pretty common thing with servers set up by manufacturers - Dell for example were setting the OS on a 12GB partition; I don't know what they do now but that was certainly the case 18months ago.

 

I'm in the same boat - but it's not the previous netman's fault..

 

less than 500MB available on most servers!!! When setup, the C partition was only 10GB

[soveryapt]

Not only me had / have this problem then!

 

Seems to be a pretty common thing with servers set up by manufacturers - Dell for example were setting the OS on a 12GB partition

 

Exactly .. seems that "12GB .. that's fine for the basic install and updates for a couple of years" and then expect you to run everything else from the other partitions .. which for things like WSUS ok, that would make sense to, but there just seems to be little or no planning involved from manufacturers when they do supply them with stupidly small System partitions .. I've just redone both out 2003R2 servers over the Easter break to ensure that there was a better amount of space on the system drives ..

[cookie_monster]

Have you moved the pagefile to another partition? That might help for now but in the long term you need to promote a new DC and then rebuild this one. I wouldn't recommend partition magic on a DC.

[ricki]

Hi

 

Dont use partition magic on servers its not designed to work with them. I had the same problem about 2 years back and my solution was to fit 2 new drives and mirror raid them.

 

Backup everthing twice.

 

Ghost the original c drive onto a external hard drive.

 

Ghost the image onto the mirrored drive and them set the machine to see the mirrored pair as the first drive and boot from that. The stone engineer did the work for me as I could not afford the server versions of the software.

 

Good luck with this one and make sure you have a full backup before you start and dont do it at a critical time.

 

Richard

[sonofsanta]

I had fun with this over the holidays - my backup DC has a 10GB boot partition thanks to the previous NM/supplier and running updates meant it ran out of space (it's only around a year old as well). Foolish me thought "that's ok, I'll change the disk to dynamic and sort it out in a jiffy!" and only after I'd made that one way trip did I remember you can't do diddly-squat to the boot partition.

 

Fair enough, then, I'll find some third party software, this'll do the trick, oh wait... they all need a basic disk, not dynamic. Buggrit.

 

In the process of flailing around after that I then managed to accidentally delete my WSUS partition so I've had to once again rebuild WSUS (on a VM this time because the DC no longer has enough hard drive space to install the program) and repopulate the database.

 

So yes, tiny 10GB boot partitions on servers with 600GB of space and 200GB sitting unallocated anyway can DIAF.

[srochford]

What's taking up all the space? 10Gb isn't massive for a server C: drive but it's not ridiculously small!

 

Run Treesize or any of the other programs which have been mentioned here before to find out where the space has all gone.

 

Look at using junctions to move stuff to another drive. For example, suppose that c:\windows\system32\dllcache is taking up a mass of space. You really want to keep that folder there but it doesn't have to be on that physical drive. What you can do is make a folder on drive D:, move the content into it and then make a link (junction) to point to the new location. Windows still sees c:\windows\system32\dllcache but you've just gained a big chunk of disc space.

 

You can move pretty much anything but you need to pick folders which are not in use (so don't try moving system32 itself!) - if you stop the windows update service then c:\windows\softwaredistribution is another good one to move.

[Arthur]

What's taking up all the space? 10GB isn't massive for a server C: drive but it's not ridiculously small!

It depends on which server OS you install though. Some are bigger than others. More so, once you include service packs/hotfixes and additional software.

 

Given that a lot of servers are still configured with two 73GB or 146GB HDDs in RAID1 for the OS - with other data stored elsewhere (separate HDDs or a SAN/NAS etc.), partitioning them doesn't make a lot of sense. Folders should be used for organizing data, not partitions. It's much easier to move the former than the latter when you run out of space.

[IanT]

powerquest volume manager is the server version of partition magic............last time I used it was at version 2, worked well.

[Brpilot99]

Move the print spooler to another drive .....

[danrhodes]

Try GParted, i've use it before, even on DC's and it works fine.

 

D

[Psymon]

I think the safest bet, if you have moved these other roles away from the DC with low space, is to create another server (physical or virtual) even on a standard PC box, make it a DC and then format the original machine.

 

Once you have it back up and running you can demote your temporary DC.

 

If you have quite a few VLAN's and dont want to change the ip helper adresses you can always change the IP of the original server and give it to the temporary one.

 

To save you having to re-set up DHCP you can take a full backup and recover it to the new temporary server, and back again after you have done the format.

 

Hope that helps,

Psy

[3s-gtech]

I've used Acronis Disk Director on our old PDC when the C: drive got too small. I had a stable backup DC too, but it moved it without the slightest issue. That machine has worked fine for a couple of years since.

[djm968]

It really annoys me when some companies just throw a server in without any thought about drive configuration or partition sizes. It is such a simple thing to configure pre-deployment but a PITA for the local support team left picking up the pieces when the “default” 10 or 12 GB system drive is full after one year of service.

 

I agree that 10GB for the system drive of a DC should be sufficient, and as this server was also performing other rolls you should be able to free some additional space to buy some time.

[Arthur]

When you have 10GB/12GB partitions, what do people do with the extra space on the HDD? Leave it unpartitioned?

[glennda]

When you have 10GB/12GB partitions, what do people do with the extra space? Leave it unpartitioned?

 

just make the whole c drive a 68gb partition

[Arthur]

just make the whole c drive a 68gb partition

That's what I would do myself, although some companies like RM still partition the HDD for some bizarre reason.

[glennda]

That's what I would do myself, although some companies like RM still partition the HDD for some bizarre reason.

 

well i bet to be honest they probably don't know the full reasoning behind it! I would assume it comes from the days when hard drives where very expensive so small os partition means they can put other stuff on rest and its just kind of stuck!

[srochford]

One reason to partition the drive is if the server has multiple roles. If it's being used as a fileserver then you may not want the home drives on the same partition as Windows because if your quotas don't work properly then you can get either deliberate or accidental denial of service against the server just by filling up a group folder.

[glennda]

Personally I set my servers up with two 72gb disks in raid 1+0 and leave the whole thing as one Partition for C: and then create another raid array in raid 5 for other data which i then partition off inside windows for say d: and E: drives. Enless I am setting up a virtual machine where I set C: at around 30gb - but obviously not raided

 

Toby