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Because of ending diskspace and other hardware capacity we are in the progress of upgrading our infrastructure from Server 2003 R2 to Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2007 SP1 to Exchange 2010.

In progress of upgrading to 2010 we will also be splitting Exchange and Primary DC (I know -_-), so exchange will have it's own hardware where diskspace won't be the question.

In order to upgrade to 2010 an upgrade to Exchange 2007 SP2 has to be performed. And that is where the headache starts:

The System has two differen partitions one for the system and installation Data (C), and one for Exchange Data files (D) (Storage Groups, QueueDB, QueueDBLog).

Now the System partition which is around 24GB has only 141MB free. Which (regarding) to the information I could gather is clearly not enough for the Exchange SP2 installation.

Are there any short term solutions I could try ? I noticed that the Windows folder already takes up around 18GB which clearly minimizes the possibilities to gather more space.


Thank you all for your help so far. I will update the list of items I could find according to your help.

  • $NTUinstall folders under Windows\ 558MB
  • ie7updates folder under Windows\ 987MB
  • Setting the Swap File to Zero on C since D already has a good sized swap file: 2095MB (very strange size)
  • C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution 1832MB

Haargh this sounds like 5472 MB to me.

Update 2

As I was sure I would have had a hard time trying to pick the "correct" answer. And some smaller advises in chat are not in the answers anyway. So I decided to give it to the answer which had the biggest part of the cake.

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Disk space requirements for Exchange 2007 SP2 are not fixed, as they vary depending on the installed server roles; I wasn't able to actually find them stated cleary anywhere... but I'm quite sure 141 MB will not be enough (and running a server with so few disk space on the system drive is indeed not a good idea at all, anyway).

A couple of suggestions to free up some space:

  • Move the page file elsewhere, or reduce its size (even to zero), at least for the duration of the SP2 upgrade.
  • Clean out the temporary files, both in C:\Windows\Temp and in C:\Documents and settings\your_user_name\Local Settings\Temp.
  • Remove any unneeded user profile, and remove big things from your desktop and documents folder (they are stored in your user profile, which is (usually) on the system drive).
  • Delete everything inside the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download folder; this is where updates downloaded from Windows Update are stored, and they tend to stay here after they have been applied, and take up a surprising amount of space.
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Moving the Swap file to the D drive should free up a few Gigabytes (assuming you haven't moved it already)

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Obviously without seeing the contents of the hard disk there aren't any surefire answers, but the Disk Cleanup Wizard usually makes a good start, and it should be safe to remove the $NTUninstall folders from within the Windows folder (unless you are planning to uninstall the hotfixes).

How far would that get you towards it?

EDIT: You could probably change your temp path environment variable to the D drive as well to see if you can make use of the space on that rather than the C drive.

EDIT2: After talking in the chat room, it's worth using windirstat to find out where hard disk space has gone.

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Windirstat is great. Make sure to launch it with "Run as Administrator" on 2008 or it won't account for all files on the disk. –  JS. Feb 14 '11 at 13:16
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