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I have a HP MediaSmart Server (EX 490) with Windows Home Server out of the box. It comes with a single 1.0 TB drive partioned 20 GB for the System disk. The system disk keeps filling up. I haven't installed anything but McAfee. Without getting into the philosophical discussions of why they would partition it thus, what is the likely culprit of this debacle? My D: Partition has plenty of space. I can get into the server only through Remote Desktop.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Blanthor
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  • I sure hope the system partition is actually 20 GB, not 20 MB :) – Siim K Dec 08 '10 at 15:45
  • Oops. Yeah it's 20 GB. I'll change that. – Blanthor Dec 08 '10 at 17:27
  • 20GB for C: is normal - WHS doesn't give you a chance to change that. If you are willing to leave the main road, try http://wiki.wegotserved.com/index.php?title=Create_Large_System_Partition_for_Windows_Home_Server. Also, my WHS system partition only uses 8GB. So, things are definitely wrong on yours. – Jay Bazuzi Dec 09 '10 at 02:54
  • Today, 20GB seems minuscule. At the time, people often had spare 80GB drives lying around that they wanted to use for WHS, so that's the minimum. At RTM, the size of the second partition was critical when copying lots of files to the server, and 60GB was limiting, hence this compromise. (I wish they had raised the minimum system drive size to 160GB instead). Drive Extender was improved in a power pack to get around the limitations at RTM. – Jay Bazuzi Dec 09 '10 at 03:01

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This happened to me on an HP EX490. My primary drive failed, so I re-installed the system. After final reboot, the system had 50MB free. Based on several other posts out there, I found 12GB of logs

This folder had 12.5GB of text files C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC1

Deleting these gave the space I needed.

WHS by default has a 20GB drive. During the normal install process there is no option to select what the partition size should be. I did find once someone said to press a function key (possibly F10) during the initial bootup of the recovery/reinstall scripts and it would give a prompt to specify a C:\ partition size.

Mark Filley
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  • I'm checking this as the answer fairly late, but the answer does correctly specify what happened on my server. – Blanthor Jan 18 '16 at 14:52
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If you have rights to install software onto the machine then I suggest you try WinDirStat or other similar program to visually map what's actually using up the disk space. Then it might be easier to pinpoint the culprit(s) and do something about it.

Siim K
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  • I have remoted into the machine, and I'm trying to use WinDirStat portable. Another challenge is that I cannot download anything from SourceForge, even after opening up IE. – Blanthor Dec 08 '10 at 17:29
  • You could try SequoiaView, it's a direct download. http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/download_sequoiaview/ – Siim K Dec 08 '10 at 19:31
  • Somewhere in Internet options there's an option to disallow file download, it's enabled by default on Windows servers. Just change it and IE will download files without any problems. – gronostaj Feb 06 '13 at 19:00
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I had this issue and part of the solution was to change the save data location of Windows Search (Indexing) to a folder I created on the D Drive. You can do this by using Remote Desktop connection.

Michael O'Leary
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Have you checked Volume Shadow copies? You can look under disk properties. Also do they have any applications hosted off of here? Could there be large amounts of files in the temp directory?

Nori
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  • I'm having trouble seeing anything on C: that's an obvious disk hog. I lament that I can't seem to get WinDirStat to work, even when I run as administrator. – Blanthor Dec 08 '10 at 23:30