Disk Partition 5

[CFix]

The Hard drive on my Windows 2000 server is partitioned into
C and D drives. While D drive still has whooping 20 GB on it, C drive is just left with 600 MB on it. What can I do to move some space from D to C drive. Or in anyway that I can create some space on C drive itself. Is their Partion Magic available for Windows 2000 server.

 

[jamor1999]

Partition magic is available for win2k, and that's probably your only option. If you had c, d, and e. You could manage something - but the system files reside on c: and you really can't touch that c drive.

 

[CFix]

I have to check if Partition Magic is available for Windows 2000 Server. The one for Win 2000 doesn't work on server. Bail me out buddies. Lack of space often interrupts my Exchange Server on it.

 

[micronmega]

Where is your pagefile? if it's on C move it to D.

Delete old profiles from c:\documents and settings, clear out the temp directories. If you have a virus scan on that machine make sure the quarantine folder is not filled with junk.

 

[dholbrook]

I do not understand where your operating system resides. The size of 600 MB is too small to even install Win 2000, so what OS are you using, and what drive does it reside on? It almost sounds like drive D: is where everything is located, and C: is only being used to boot to D:???? AT 600 MB, C: should only contain the boot files, and nothing else, since it is too small to even be considered for a pagefile space. Is this a dynamic or basic drive configuration?

If your OS is on D:, then you really do not have a proble, the 600 MB is just wasted space. Are you sure the partition is C: and D:, or is it a recovery partition (no letter, at front part of the drive) and only a real 20 GB C: partition?

Help us out with a little more info, OK?

HTH
David

 

[CFix]

The operating system is a Windows 2000 Server. C drive actually is 8 GB in size. Its all used up now. The maximum space users on C drive are the anti-virus program and the Microsoft Exchange server. The remaining space on C drive is now only 600 MB. On the other hand D drive has 20 GB of free space available.
Its a basic drive configuration.

Had it been Windows 2000, I would have done the space relocation using the Partition Magic. But Partition Magic doesn't work for Windows 2000 server. Someone has to advise me on this too..if some version of Partition Magic does.

Just as Micronmega has said, I will check the quarantine folder. Is it safe to delete the files from quarantine folder?

 

[jamor1999]

One more thing to try - it may not help rescue much space, but if you are sharing printers on that server, you might want to go into the start/settings/printers window and click on file/server properties and select the advanced tab and change the path to the spooler folder from c: to d:.

You may not be printing at all, but we noticed that one of the first things to hiccup was printing when disk space was low.

 

[JBruyet]

The files in the quarantine folder are those files that your antivirus program said had a virus in them. Deleting them shouldn't hurt anything.

Thanks,

Joe Brouillette

 

[dholbrook]

It really helps when you state all the information and describe the situation correctly!

You can surely delete the quarantine files, they are bad anyway.

Just for the record, Windows wants to have about 10% free space on the drive as a minimum (in your case, about 800 MB) in order to function correctly, so you are right to be concerned. You have yet to say anything about how much memory you have in the system, but the pagefile on the c: should be at least 1.5 times the RAM size, or larger. However, if you just need to make more space available (especially since your Exchange is also on C:, then a quick way to gain additional usable space is to create a new pagefile on the D: drive, and then remove the one on the C:. However, I would recommend you hold this as a last emergency measure, as it is a way to buy immediate breathing relief to buy time to really fix the problem or to recover your Exchange server when the system crashes from lack of space. If this is a large RAM system (to support the Exchange Server), then this pagefile could be several GB in size.

Since this is a server, I would remove any user accounts on the server except the administrator. These accounts can be quite large because of the documents stored under each user, so be careful, and make sure you back it all up in case you need to restore anything. If that is not possible, then I would for sure delete all the temporary Internet files (under each user listed under the documents and settings directory, username, local settings)to include all the funny numbered directories listed under the folder called content.IE?. (note, the system will re-create these numbered folders, so you can say yes when the system tells you these are system folders, etc.)

NOTE: You will have to make sure the directory view is set to display hidden directories in order to even see these files under the Local Settings directory (In Win Explorer, go to Tools, folder options, view, show hidden folders).

Next, in all users Temp directories, I would clean out all files with ~??????.xxx as a name, as these are old temp files, no longer needed. You can also clean out the files ending in .tmp, especially if they are 0 bytes in size.

I do not know how many applications you have on this system, but another approach would be to uninstall these applications, then re-install them, but do not use the default location, use drive D: instead. While this will not save any space under the OS, it will move all the rest of the application files to the other drive, (which probably now reside under Programs and Files) and this can be a very large amount of drive space for applications like MS Office (hundreds of MB).

You actually have a more serious problem if your Exchange is actually installed on the C: (BIG MISTAKE!) as the Exchnage space requirement grows as users add messages to the data base. I seriously hope the database does not reside on the C: drive. You should investigate moving Exchange to a different server, whose only function is Exchange and DC. Please make sure that the Exchnage is NOT installed in the C: on the new server, and that you put it on a dedicated drive space big enough for it to grow and still have room to do data recovery and other maintenance actions. This is a disaster just waiting to bite you.

Another tool to add usable space is to compress directories on the hard drive, but I would be very careful here. You can probably recover a lot of space by compressing the Program Files directory, but you will incur a performance hit on the system doing this, which should be ok if this is a fast system. Another area to compress is the Documents and Settings directory (assuming you could not delete most of these users), as this area easily compresses and the only piece of it being used at any time is from the one user currently logged on.

The previous comment concerning the printers is very important, especially since you have so little space left. A user printing a large file or many jobs at once could take all the free space on the drive and crash the server with a 100% full drive. Not fun, as you probably would not be able to boot the system at that point. Different problem, but one to worry about for sure.

Hope these ideas help, but my primary suggestion is to rebuild the system correctly, otherwise all is just temporary patches to hold off the final system crash that will come, as you can not easily stop the Exchange database growth.

HTH

David

 

[wolluf]

Although Partition Magic doesn't run in win2k server, you can use the rescue disk (boot from floppy) version, I understand (previous tip on these forums). Also, Acronis Partition Expert runs on 2k server (similar price to PM). The 2k server version of PM is Volume Manager - which is a lot more expensive.

 

[CFix]

There are lots of programs that I can see under
C:\Program Files
like Frontpage, Media Player and others which don't have to be on a server at all.

But none of these programs shows up under:
Control Panel--> Add Remove Programs.

How can I delete those?

 

[de1458]

if you have your exchange's database on c:\, the following might help you gain some space, some time can be couple gigabytes,
use the system manager go to all the stores on the exchange, here is the path.
'Administrative Groups' -> <your domain> -> 'Servers' -> <your server>
then on every individual stores, right on each one of them including public folders, select property, and look at the 'database' tab, just put them all in the folder you designate for them, of course you have to decide how to organize them, then hit the apply, the exchange will move the database, and/or transaction log if also want to move them but be very very careful with the transcation logs if they are damaged your exchange will not work or even unable to recover,
to do the database move, be sure to have a up to the minute backup as a precaution.

good luck

 

[CFix]

Currently its a basic drive confoguration. How will it effect if I change it to Dynamic ?

 

[de1458]

be careful with the dynamic disk on win2k server, if you are going to add another harddisk you can do spanning your c: to add more space, but the volume manager from powerquest, as wolluf mentioned, will not work on dynamic volumes.

 

[scquan]

Make sure you have SP3 installed
Back up all your system including Exchange, pay particular attention to maing sure that you carry out all the steps for backing up exchange.

Remove the old drive.
Buy a new drive preferably a new one make sure it is of the same type i.e. IDE/SCSII.

Install a fresh copy of Windows 2000 server on it.

Restore using the backup.

Restart the server in Advanced directory repair mode.

Restore the Exchange storage

Restart the server.

If every thing is OK add the old disk to the server and configure a software raid 1. Beware this slows down the server disk access some but you now have the security of a mirrored drive.

I have carried out this procudure on several occasions and have had no problems. But if it fails for some reason you still have the old disk to fall back on!

 

[twicki]

I would seriously recommend re-configuring your drives. I have always found best practice is

1. Install a Smart Array and setup the drives so you have one logical drive on Raid Level 5. This way you can just add new drives as required and in case of a drive failing you will still keep running.

2. Setup 3 sections to the drive. One for Windows about 4gb one for any other programs and one for Fle & Print Shairing.

3. Never ever install anything other that Windows into the Windows Section.

4. Make sure your pagefile is located somewhere other than the Windows partitition.

It seems to me that all the advise you have been given is trying to delay the problems you are having instead of dealing with them. It is going to be much more costly to the business if this server falls over than if you plan a way forward and over a weekend rebuild the server.

 

[scquan]

To Twicki
Could not agree more, mine is just the cheaper option...

 

[twicki]

I know what your saying but as we have learnt in our company sometimes you try to scrimp and scrape but in the long run it will probably cost you more. I was once told business who's computer systems went down and where down for more than 5 days resulted in 90% going under withing 12 months. But I suppose at the end of the day it depends on the size of the company and how big a risk they want to take.

 

[ato]

I had the same problem like cfix. My server 2000 configured as a mirror array. I had 2 partition. C: and E:
My C: drive is ran out of space and my E: drive have about 26G free space. So I install Volume Manager to increase my space on C: but it not successful. Please help. It any of you guy expert on this software. Thank you.

 

[dholbrook]

Be careful on spanning drives, as first, they must be dynamic, and second (and more important) a loss of a piece of a spanned drive destroys the data on the entire spanned area. In other words, a spanned drive, while it gives you a bigger drive space, also has a higher disaster cost! Note also, that you cannot extend a system volume (C: in this case) or a boot volume (also C: in this case), so spaning the drive is not an option for your problem (C: is out of space).

Microsoft does not allow you to play games with the system and boot partitions, although some third part applications will actually do it successfully. While you can install the OS in a volume created on a raid array, I do not believe (Not totally positive on this) you are even allowed to install the OS onto a spanned volume, it has to be on a volume on a single (virtual in the RAID ARRAY case) drive. Win 2000 looks at a RAID ARRAY (hardware version) as a single drive, which is also why you can mirror two RAID 5 drive configurations, regardless of how many drive physically constitute the arrays.

What it all boils down to is that good planning must go into the original setup of the system. Everything you are trying to do here is just stop gap, it does not fix the real problem (that the system was not designed correctly), especially since it is also an Exchange server. Your disaster is just waiting to happen.

By the way, many applications that do not show up in the add/remove applications actually have an uninstall program installed in the directory where they were originally installed (look under the start programs, and see if the applicaion lists an uninstall there).

In addition, just because programs show up under the program files directory, it does not mean they are actually installed (Front Page is one of these), it is just a place holder, especially for Microsoft programs. Check to see if there are content files actually installed on the drive.

I highly agree with all the comments with re-doing your system. I would NEVER build a DC + Exchange on a system that was not a RAID 5 (or at very least a MIRROR SETUP) for both the OS and the EXCHANGE portions. These are two very critical systems, and need the best redundancy available. Also, as I stated before, DO NOT PUT the EXCHANGE database on the same partition/volume/drive space as the OS, and do not use the Exchange computer for other functions like DNS, DHCP, etc., as you will suffer a performance hit.

While Exchange 2000 wants to be on a DC with the AD, I would not want this to be the only DC in the system either, if at all possible. (Note, with the cost of simple systems today, building a simple second DC, single processor, no raid, etc., is dirt cheap when compared to the cost of the disaster when the company stops functioning because the only DC is down and no one can work. Use a desktop if all it is doing is providing the survival capability, (total cost maybe $2000?).

Remember, COST CUTTING AND POOR PLANNING = MASSIVE PROBLEMS AND MASSSIVE COSTS LATER! (Pay me now, or pay me later!)

HTH

David