Disk space problem

jadams

2[H]4U
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Mar 14, 2010
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http://imgur.com/F1aMcy7

Windows is reporting that I'm out of space on one of my Server 2008 R2 machines. However WinDirStat is saying I'm only using less than 10% of the drive (25GB). Manual check of folder shows even less usage. Hidden files are shown so I'm not missing anything.

wtf is going on? please and thank you.
 
My advice is to boot your PC onto a linux based live usb stick and take a look at the filesystem there. This way you will have 100% visibility of all files on filesystem.
 
Hidden files are shown so I'm not missing anything.

Sure you are. WinDirStat won't show you everything because by default the Administrator group does not have permission to read every folder or list its contents (so the space is wrong), hence why System Volume Information shows up as 0 bytes. I'm sure there are a few more instances of this and I bet you that's where the 'missing space' has gone.
 
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The account your logged into may not have the correct permissions on that drive to properly read the file system information. Right click that drive and go into Security, add your current user and allow modify.
 
Loaded up the ubuntu live cd and found a few SQL error logs that have grew to astronomical sizes.
 
You can delete them from linux. This is how I deal with undeletable files/folders.

Thanks for the heads up.

Also as a side note, I wasnt running WinDirStat with elevated permissions. Once I did that it found the ginormous files. It was an oversight on my end as well. I didnt physically go into each folder, but rather viewed the properties of each folder. This folder in particular reported 0KB used. It wasnt until (thanks to the linux cd) that I found out exactly what folder these files were in that I tried to access the folder in Windows. when I did it prompted me for elevated permissions.

And there you have it. Thanks for the help.
 
How often are you backing this server up? That should have taken care of the standard log file issue...
 
the server is not quite in production so back ups and routine maintenance have not yet been applied.

Curious though, how would backups of the server fix the log issue? Wouldnt it just backup the huge logs right along with it?
 
I guess it depends on if these are transaction logs, or not. I'm not terribly knowledgeable on SQL in general, but as far as I know if it's a Windows based install, the logs can/will be parsed out and shrunk with a standard full backup.
 
Further investigation shows that the log in question simply repeats:


An exception ocurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 15517, State: 1. Cannot execute as the database principal because the principal "dbo" does not exist, this type of principal cannot be impersonated, or you not have permission

For now, I've setup scripts to shutdown sql, delete the log file and start sql backup nightly until I get a chance to check it out.
 
Theres not really a good forum that SQL troubleshooting seems to go in. I generally post this stuff in GenMay.
 
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