Disk Full and Crashing: How to Urgently Recover Windows Disk Space

Sometimes, you come across Windows machines that are crashing because they’ve run out of disk space. And even after you do the regular cleanup, it either fills up quickly or you need more space. Here’s something to add to your arsenal.

A .dmp files

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Look for .dmp files. Use powershell to search for all dmp files and delete them.

B .msp files

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There are these .msp files which are Windows Installer Patch files. There’s a high chance that some have been orphaned and Windows doesn’t delete them. Run the following in an elevated powershell window. We ran this on a three-year-old Windows machine and recovered 20GB, enough to give you time to get a new SSD or go through the documents.¹

1: Check total size of the Windows Installer folder

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"{0:N2} GB" -f ((Get-ChildItem "C:\Windows\Installer" -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum).Sum / 1GB)

2: Identify orphaned .msp files not registered to any installed product

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$orphanedMsp = Get-ChildItem "C:\Windows\Installer" -Filter *.msp |
    Where-Object {
        $path = $_.FullName
        $found = $false
        Get-ChildItem "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData" -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
            Where-Object { $_.GetValueNames() -contains "LocalPackage" } |
            ForEach-Object { if ($_.GetValue("LocalPackage") -eq $path) { $found = $true } }
        -not $found
    }

3: Report how many orphaned files were found and their total size

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$orphanedMsp | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum | Select-Object Count, @{N="GB";E={"{0:N2}" -f ($_.Sum/1GB)}}

4: Move orphaned .msp files to a safe backup location first

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New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path "C:\temp\patch_backup" -Force
$orphanedMsp | Move-Item -Destination "C:\temp\patch_backup" -Verbose

5: Verify the move was successful

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(Get-ChildItem "C:\temp\patch_backup").Count

6: Once satisfied, permanently delete them to reclaim the space

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Remove-Item "C:\temp\patch_backup\*.msp" -Verbose

7: Confirm free space recovered

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Get-PSDrive C | Select-Object Used, Free

C Stop Volume Shadow Copy

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Generally this is taking up upwards of 3GB. If you’re desperately needing space, you can delete the copy and turn off the service.

In an elevated terminal, run these:

• Query

vssadmin list shadowstorage

• To delete

vssadmin delete shadows /for=C: /all /quiet

• To disable it thereafter

sc config vss start= disabled

• To verify everything went okay, run the first ’list’ command again.

D Run compaction

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In an elevated terminal, run these:

• Query the state of compaction and if the system allowed it be compacted

compact /CompactOs:query

• Fore-enable compaction

compact /CompactOs:always

• Force-disable compaction

compact /CompactOs:never

E Disable hibernation

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• So you can delete hiberfile.sys which is always in several GBs.

Note

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• Always use WinDirStat to get the state of disk usage first.

😁