A terrifying C drive
For the last couple years this file server has been sitting at a full C:
drive almost constantly. It’d fill up and we’d find a couple megabytes of
files to delete. Unfortunately someone deleted indexes of search databases
and Windows update files so the source files couldn’t be automatically cleaned.
Finally the drive got to the point where the only things lefter were Windows
event logs and those files. Running the “Disk Cleanup” tool would constantly
return a couple KB of files but would balloon its own log file (CBS.log) in
the process.
Frustratingly enough, there was plenty of free space on the logical volume as exposed by the RAID controller but the C drive was only given 39.9GB of that volume. 39.9GB! Because another partition was stacked right behind it there was no space for the C volume to expand.
So it was finally time to delete that latter partition and expand the C!
I made half a dozen copies of the data on the following volume and clicked delete partition… and sure enough… the whole system hourglassed… for about an hour…
This was quite a nerveracking time as I watched not much happen on the resource monitor. But it finally completed and I was able to expand the C volume.
So we’ll see how the system performs now but some recommendations for the future:
- Test your backups, but also have faith in them. I’ve probably made a bunch of copies that’ll sit around for too long now because I didn’t trust backups.
- Windows is a massive pain in the butt getting me into this position, but at the same time the volume manage did work like it said it would.
- Strive to be able to drive a drill through your computers and servers! When my newest hire started, at the end of their second day I asked “are you ready for me to put a drill through your laptop?” Treating hardware as potentially ephemeral makes for more resilient systems.
Here’s to another 500GB on this C:\ drive!