Running Low On Disk Space on a Drive

Hi Guys,

Sometimes you may come across an issue on your servers where you find a drive running low on space and you are struggling to find any files to delete.

There are a number of commands that you can run from the command line to help you claw back some space by removing files which are completely safe to remove. This applies to all server OS’s such as Windows 2000, Windows 2003 ,Windows 2008 etc.

First of all open command prompt as an Administrator of the machine.

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Next if you get to the root of the desired drive by typing “cd ”.

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Now if you run the following commands you should be able to get some free space back.

del *.tmp /s

del *.dmp /s

del *.mdmp /s

Windows 7 / 2008 – rd /s c:$recycle.bin

Windows 2003 / XP – rd /s c:recycler

Now you should have gained back a bit of space, but if you are still in need of getting some more space back then not to worry, i have something else you can try.

Now if we go to the system drive (Typically C: ) via my computer.

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Now if we open the “Windows” Folder and then open the “Software Distribution Folder.

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And then finally if we open the “Download” folder.

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The files in this folder are basically windows updates that have been previously downloaded, so we can safely delete all files inside this folder, It is best if we shift delete these files, just to save us having to remove them again from the recycle bin.

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Daniel Davies

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