DL380 Server - Windows Server 2003 - hard drive space vanishing

[George Burchfield]

I have a DL 380 Server at my location. One of the hard drives randomly fills up and neither I nor other techs have been able to find the cause. 80 GB of free space randomly dissapears, then the free space reappears, some times it takes a reboot to reclaim the space, other times it appears on it's own. This has been one of those issues that we can not find a cause.

[Mark Woodruff]

Few ideas:

1. Try dir /s/a > empty.txt when the space is there and dir /s/a > full.txt when it is not and then compare the results to see what's changed.

2. Load process explorer:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Do a find (control-F) on the drive letter and see what processes have a file open on it.

3. Try chkdsk and see if anything turns up.

There are some programs that open hidden files and write to them. They won't show up in the usual ways. That might be the case.

[George Burchfield]

Done all that and still can find nothing. Several of our server ops team have looked at it with no avail.

Whatever the cause is, it is not obvious.

[Saberus]

Have you created a fixed virtual memory size? If you let Windows control it automatically, the swap file will grow as needed for a program, and it's not quite perfect on releasing the space, especially if the program never tells the system it doesn't need the memory anymore.

That's were my gut takes me, see if there's a program using a lot of virtual memory.