Missing disk space on Windows 2008..

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

I'm at my wits end with some Windows Server 2008 (not R2) servers. They're on a virtual environment so, accordingly, we try and size them to make best use of available disk space and resources.

The VM in question has a 40GB C: drive and a 30GB D: drive. There is one single application installed (which seemingly only occupies 3GB of space) but the VM is now down to only 2GB of space free on the C: drive.

We've done EVERYTHING to free up space on this disk:

* Relocate the page file to another disk

* Disable Windows Error Reporting (there was a large cache of error reports - the app it runs is unreliable!)

Thing is, there doesn't seem to be anything else to delete. Searching around, there are only two user accounts on there with minimals amounts of data in their profiles, and there are no temporary or installation files lying around. Essentially I have about 15-20GB unaccounted for. I'm aware that the winsxs folder is a popular culprit for taking (and lying about) disk space but I don't think you can manually intervene in cleaning it up. I can grow the disk space if needed but I'm just infuriated that I can't see what's taking up this space.

Does anyone have any tips? We don't seem to get this issue with Windows Server 2008 R2 VM's. I deal with Windows Server day in, day out but must admit this has had me puzzled for a while!

Thanks in advance.

[BajiRav]

Have you checked Windows update backups?

[Chicane-UK Veteran]

Nevermind - answered my own question... it was cached reports from Windows Error Reporting, but they were not in user profile folders - they were in ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue - helpfully Windows obfuscated the space the reports were taking when getting the properties of each folder so I couldn't see the space being used there, but TreeSize didn't seem to suffer the same problem.

Problem solved.