Low Hard Disk Space on C drive

Question

I got a DELL PowerEdge 2900 Series Server in our office running windows 2003 Standard Edition(service pack 2). I have recently noticed a windows notification saying that "the system is running on Low Disk Space." Now i only have 300MB of free space left on my C Drive. But i have 20GB free space avaliable on D drive. Is there any way that i can extend the size of the C Drive with out Disturbing the Current Settings and installation????( i don't wanna install my OS and Applications again). What is the Safest way to resolev this, as i can't affors to loose the data.
Is there any way i can get the backup image of my OS and the applications and then do partition and restore the backup image with out installing the OS and applications again.

My server Configuration:
It has a 2x80GB Hard disk. They are on RAID 1 configuration. I have Allocated.
The Basicn HArd disk Size is 74GB of which
-->39MB is used for EISA Configuration
-->12.77GB(C: Drive)is used as primary partition on which i have have installed Windows, Active Directory, Sql Server 2005 and my other applications
-->61.18GB(D: Drive)is and Extended Partition with Logical Drive.

Thx in Advance....
Charles.

dining_philosop · Answer

Since you don't have any free space left on your RAID 1 virtual disk, the best option may be to add capacity to the virtual disk by converting it to a RAID 5 by adding one more disk (using PERC's RLM and Capacity expansion features). After that you can use a partition tool like Norton partition magic to expand C:. As always make sure you have a backup.

jcn77056 · Answer

A quick fix is to move the bulk of your pagefile to the D: drive.  Right-click on My Computer and select properties.  Click on the Advanced tab, Performance Settings, Advanced tab (again), Virtual Memory Change, you can set a pagefile size for all available drives.  Create a pagefile on D and set it to 2x physical memory.  Reboot and change the C: to a relatively small file size, reboot and you should recover space.  If it doesn't shrink the pagefile on C:, set it to no pagefile on C, reboot, delete the pagefile and then create a new small file on C:.  If you have a copy of BartPE, you can boot that and delete the pagefile on C and next time you boot, it will be the correct size.   Second, you can delete any unused profiles for users under C:\Documents and Settings.   Last, there are partition tools like Paragon's Partition Manager here which work on servers and allow you to shrink and grow partitions without a reinstall.  We used an older version on servers to change partition sizes.

Dev Mgr · Answer

I would agree with the recommendation to migrate to raid 5 and then use a partitioning tool.

However, for a quick temporary fix, check the c:\windows folder to see if there are a bunch of folders with $-signs in their name. These are backups for applied hotfixes. If you're having no issues, you could consider deleting these to free up some space.

Also, if you applied SP2 (it didn't come with the install media/factory installed), you may have quite a bit of space to clear from that (the install file itself, the extracted version of this file, and the backups it makes of the original files from before applying the service pack; in other words about 3 times the SP size).

charles_kodali · Answer

Thank you all guyz for the replies.

I am in the process of upgrading my HDD to RAID5. But i am not very confident abt expanding the C drive Space. I have checked the Partition MAnager software's and they are very expensive. Is there not another way of expanding the Space on the C drive?

Dev Mgr · Answer

Dell's extpart can extend the C-drive, but you need free space behind the C-partition (not behind the D-drive that comes right after the C-drive).

This means you'll need to back up your D-drive, delete that partition, and then you can extend the C-drive.

I wouldn't max it out though. After you extended it, recreate the D-drive and restore your data.

jcn77056 · Answer

I know it looks like a lot of money but what's your time and new hard drives costing?  And once you get your new drives, you'll still have to backup the disks, blow everything away and create all new containers.  Do you have a tested backup recovery process in place?  If not, that's the first thing you'll need when you convert to RAID-5.   Expanding partitions is always a pain.  If we only knew then what we know now...

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Low Hard Disk Space on C drive

Was this post helpful?