Low Disk Space on OS Partition

[william]

I seem to be having a disk space issue on my desktop computer and was
hoping that somebody out there might be able to help. I have what
appears to be a rather unique partitioning scheme, so most of the
suggestions that I can find on the Internet really do not apply to my
particular situation.

As is customary, I have the C:\ drive as the primary bootable
partition, on which my WINDOWS directory is located. This partition is
the first partition on the primary hard drive. From there, however,
things seem a little different than most other installations I can
find. The Program Files directory is actually a mounted logical drive
in an extended partition on my primary hard drive, and my Documents and
Settings folder is a mounted logical drive in an extended partition on
my secondary hard drive. I have several other partitions mounted under
the Documents and Settings and Program Files folders in which I break
down user accounts and games, keeping them all isolated and backing
them up on the opposite drives such that, in case I lose one drive or
it becomes inoperable, I still have all of the data from said drive.

The C:\ drive is set up as a 5.58GB NTFS file system and, when I
installed Windows, I had at least 50% of the drive free. Currently the
Properties dialog for the Windows OS (C partition says that I have
511MB of free space out of 5.08GB. Of course, this is because I just
rebooted my computer because it claimed it only had 58MB of space left
and was running extremely slowly.

I have remapped my TEMP and TMP directories to other partitions, as
well as compressed, gotten rid of, or moved all of the $NtUninstall...
folders to other partitions, but I am still running low on disk space.
I looked in the System Volume Information folder to see if there were a
bunch of System Restore checkpoints that needed to be deleted, but the
folder is virtually empty since System Restore shut itself down due to
low disk space a while back. I also checked the Recycle Bin just in
case, but it, too, is empty. The only other folder on my primary
partition is the WINDOWS directory, which claims to be 3.36GB in size,
so I can't seem to find the "missing" space on my drive.

I tried running the Disk Cleanup utility, but, as expected, it really
did nothing other than freeing up a bunch of space on other, virtually
empty, partitions. I also thought that, perhaps, Windows was using a
large Swap File on the primary partition, but, upon further
examination, the only Paging File listed in my Virtual Memory dialong
is the 2-4GB file on my Swap partition, which is the first primary
partition on my secondary hard drive. The Windows OS partitions is set
to "No paging file."

Another interesting tidbit is that, at one point, I accidentally moved
something that Windows must have deemed necessary (in other words,
Windows would not come up when I rebooted the computer). I managed to
bring the system up in Safe Mode as the Administrator account and, when
I did, I had over 2GB of free space on the OS partition. I fixed the
problem with the missing file (which was not a 2GB file) and, when I
managed to log back in with my normal user account, all of the space
was again missing.

Does anybody have any advice, thoughts, or amusing anecdotes that might
be able to help me in my current predicament? I fear that, if I do not
find the answer soon, my partition may fill up and I will be left
without a usable computer. I could repartition, but without knowing
where the actual problem lies, it would most certainly only delay the
inevitable.

Thanks for any help in advance!

 

[Kerry Brown]

Reinstall Windows and use a less complicated setup. Instead of mounting
volumes move the folders to where you want them. Yes, your methods "should"
work. In reality it's way too complicated and as you have found out the more
complicated the setup the harder it is to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
At the very least increase you system partition to 20 GB.

 

[DL]

And, in any case, if the hd goes south you may lose it all anyway, no matter
how many partitions you set up.
And with the above in mind your backup stratergy is flawed.

Either start over with a clean sys, or use a third party utility to
reorganise your sys, into at the most 3 partitions, having backed up data to
external media first.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I have several other
partitions mounted under the Documents and Settings and Program Files
folders in which I break down user accounts and games, keeping them
all isolated and backing them up on the opposite drives such that, in
case I lose one drive or it becomes inoperable, I still have all of
the data from said drive.

Let me point out that it's rare that you lose a single partition and the
rest of the drive remains usable. It's far more likely that the entire drive
will fail at once. So the protection that you think you have by separating
things by partitioning this way is mostly imaginary.

If your data is important to you, it needs to be protected by backup to
external media not stored in the computer. Having multiple partitions (or
even separating data on a second physical drive) doesn't substitute for
backup, and is nowhere near good enough.

Over and above that, be aware that if you lose the drive Windows is
installed on, you also will lose all your installed programs, including the
games you think are protected by being on another partition. Even when you
reinstall Windows, your programs will be missing the many entries and
pointers to them that used to be within the
old Windows installation, in the registry and elsewhere. They will no
longer run.

The C:\ drive is set up as a 5.58GB NTFS file system

For almost everyone, that's *way* too small. Most people should have at
least 10-20 for the Windows drive.

and, when I
installed Windows, I had at least 50% of the drive free.

Yes, but the used space grows as you install programs, create more restore
points, use the recycle bin, etc.

Currently
the Properties dialog for the Windows OS (C partition says that I
have 511MB of free space out of 5.08GB. Of course, this is because I
just rebooted my computer because it claimed it only had 58MB of
space left and was running extremely slowly.

It wasn't running slowly because of how much free space you had.

I have remapped my TEMP and TMP directories to other partitions, as
well as compressed, gotten rid of, or moved all of the $NtUninstall...
folders to other partitions, but I am still running low on disk space.

As I said above, you don't have enough space on C:. There are things you can
do (as you've tried) to somewhat alleviate the situation temporarily, but
you can't really solve the problem permanently except by making C: bigger.

I looked in the System Volume Information folder to see if there were
a bunch of System Restore checkpoints that needed to be deleted, but
the folder is virtually empty since System Restore shut itself down
due to low disk space a while back. I also checked the Recycle Bin
just in case, but it, too, is empty. The only other folder on my
primary partition is the WINDOWS directory, which claims to be 3.36GB
in size, so I can't seem to find the "missing" space on my drive.

I tried running the Disk Cleanup utility, but, as expected, it really
did nothing other than freeing up a bunch of space on other, virtually
empty, partitions. I also thought that, perhaps, Windows was using a
large Swap File on the primary partition, but, upon further
examination, the only Paging File listed in my Virtual Memory dialong
is the 2-4GB file on my Swap partition, which is the first primary
partition on my secondary hard drive. The Windows OS partitions is
set to "No paging file."

This won't help your space problem, but setting C: to "No paging file" is a
bad thing to do. For more information, read this article by the late MVP,
Alex Nichol, "Virtual Memory in Windows XP " at
http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[AJR]

Talk about a confusing setup - Ken your response was excellent - worth
reading.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Talk about a confusing setup - Ken your response was excellent - worth
reading.

Thanks for the kind words.