Hi
One of the drives on a domain controller has a disk space issue.
Last Thursday a domain controller on our network could not be accessed either remotely or locally - I could log on with the domain administrator account but the desktop appeared as a black screen (only the mouse pointer was visible). There was no response from
Ctrl+alt+del. I had to force a shutdown and then restarted the computer after which it was fine.
I have a scheduled task that runs twice a day. The task uses Windows Backup to backup the System State. The data is saved to the D: drive (an internal drive) which has a capacity of 189GB. Usually, there is at least 100GB of free space. This allows for several
days of System State backups to accumulate. I usually keep just one day's worth of backups and delete older ones. However, there is usually space for at least 5 days of System state backups.
Today, I had noticed that the System State backup had not completed today (Tuesday) or yesterday (it last ran on Sunday). When I checked the amount of free disk space it reported just 10GB. I emptied the Recycle Bin and deleted one older System State backup.
I have now manually run the System State backup.
Using Windows Explorer I checked the drive statistics and am unable to account for well over 100GB of disk space. The Drive statistics report that 166GB of disk space has been consumed:
http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/4360/4a02.jpg
However, when I access the D: drive and select all the folders the statistics report that the folders contain just 38GB of data
http://img841.imageshack.us/img841/9601/ytk5m.jpg
Explorer is configured to show hidden files/folders and protected operating system files.
I ran a disk analysis program and it reported problems accessing files in the D:\$RECYCLE.BIN folder and the Backup catalog folder. No other problems were reported.
http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9612/kcgb.jpg
Here is an analysis of the drive space usage organised by folder:
http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/7727/lmfs.jpg
However, the inaccessible files in the D:\$RECYCLE.BIN folder seem unlikely to be the source of the 'hidden' data as the Recycle Bin is configured to use a maximum of 15360MB on drive D:\
For information: Two weeks ago I had configured Group Policy to enable UAC Admin Approval Mode for the built-in Administrator account. However, this setting was not allowing me to access the System State backups without UAC prompting and the shortcut I had
placed on the desktop which pointed to the backup folder located at D:\WindowsImageBackup\Phobos\SystemStateBackup no longer worked. Yesterday, I changed the policy back to Not Defined, but I don't know if this has any bearing on the problem. However, I am
still unable to access the system State backups without being prompted by the UAC dialog and the shortcut still does not work. I'm hoping this will be resolved after a restart.
We also use DFS but there is no replication configured between this domain controller which hosts DFS and the server hosting the data.
I am going to schedule chkdsk to run tonight when I restart the server and see if that helps.
In the meantime can anyone help me with this, please? As this machine is a domain controller I want to tread very carefully so any advice will be gratefully received.
Thanks!