Windows Server 2003

  • Windows,  Windows Server 2003,  Windows Server 2012

    Windows reports incorrect free space on a disk

    I had an interesting one today. Received a call for a disk that is running out of disk space and I thought, easy, quickly log on and clear some space. It turns out that the total data on the disk was 5GB in size, with the disk being 40GB in capacity, but the available free space reported was 4GB. This baffled me a bit but after some assistance from an internet search and colleague we quickly found that the problem was related to shadow copies taking up space. In our scenario, shadow copies were disabled but running vssadmin list shadowstorage in the cmd line told us a different story. The…