Low Disk Space When Plenty of Room

[zshuford]

I'm getting a low disk space error on my Dell server running SBS 2003 with dual 250 GB RAID 1 hard drives.

When I installed everything, I just went with the defaults and it left me with a ~16 GB partiton for my C drive. Later on, I formated the remaining 216 GB drive. Since then, I've been recieving the following error every day:

________________________________

Alert on XXXSERVER at 10/24/2006 2:58:46 PM

The following disk is low on free disk space. Low levels of free disk space can cause performance problems and prevent users from saving files on the disk.

Drive Letter: HarddiskVolume4
Free Disk Space: 0.000000. MB
% Free Disk Space: 0.000000.%

You can disable this alert or change its threshold by using the Change Alert Notifications task in the Server Management Monitoring and Reporting taskpad.
_____________________________________________

I suspect for some reason the formating only took one of the HD's and not the other in the RAID setup, but I don't know how to verify this. Any pointers?

 

[markdmac]

I'm going to take a guess that you are using ShadowCopy.

I've run into this many times. What happens is that ShadowCopy creates multiple backups and they take up disk space. If you are set to retain 5 backups, then a sixth one is created. When it is verified to be good, the oldest is deleted. So for a few minutes (sometimes seconds) you have an extra set of data that later gets deleted. So you go to check space and find you have plenty free.

Either ignore the messages or reduce the number of backups you store.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

 

[zshuford]

Thanks for the tip, but that's not it. I have enough space on my backup HD that an extra copy still leaves about 30GB free.

I'm completely at a loss here. When I right click on My COmputer and choose Manage and then choose Disk Management, I see a Disk 1 with three partitions and a Disk 2 with one partiiton.

Should these nubmers (Disk 1, 2) be the same as the one in the alert I get (HarddiskVolume4)?

If so, I'm really mystified, since I don't have a 3rd disk, much less a 4th.

 

[markdmac]

Do you have a USB drive attached to the server?

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

 

[tfg13]

The other thing I've run into is with Veritas products having a log/temp file that after completion is deleted, but while running fills up the drive. Any 3rd party products doing this?

 

[basst]

Is your drive formated as FAT32?
If so you are probably hitting the 4GB limit even if your drive is much larger.

Convert to NTFS to make the whole drive accessible.

 

[SnoopFrogg]

If you don't have a fix yet:

Run a rootkit scan. I know somebody who experienced the same symptoms and discovered a rootkit after running a scan.

[purple]
SnoopFrogg
MCSE - Windows Server 2003
[/purple]