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Davek1ttt-8895 avatar image
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Davek1ttt-8895 asked Davek1ttt-8895 answered

server 2012r2 disk access questions

Long story made short... server 2012r2 very basic system for local file sharing and web server mostly. c: drive was failing, ended up putting in new drive and restoring a bare metal backup from a few days earlier and got everything back... this is good. BUT after trying several things and spending days watching the disk resource monitor i am left with a few questions...

  1. old drive was 1TB, new one is 4TB. I also added a second 4TB drive while i was at it. While moving some stuff to the new empty drive i learned the difference between MBR and GPT, changed the empty drive to GPT and it works fine. but why can' i change the new drive that has the system and c: drives to GPT? it has a total of 4 usable partitions now and still lots of unassigned space i might like to use but can't access as an mbr drive.

  2. i have a fairly simple c# dotnet app i run, it's only disk access is reading and writing settings when starting up or shutting down. I see it periodically reading/writing something in System Volume Information... I can't do that as administrator, but it can... i'm assuming some dotnet class has some special permission to allow this, but WHAT is it putting in that folder???

  3. The old c: drive had filled up and was badly fragmented even though the automatic defrag was supposedly set up to run... after replacing the drive, running sfc/scannow and dism cleanup, doing backups, and running defrag manually several times, even letting it go through the 1st pass consolidation which took hours but stopping it at the beginning of the 2nd pass, it still reports 28% fragmented. what's up with that???

  4. I thought i knew where most of the log files windows generated ended up... boy was i wrong... there are log files scattered all over the c: drive, some just as .log files which except for some in protected directories are easy to find, but some packed into zip or cab files, some i can seem to turn off, but at least the dhcp service says i can turn it off but it keeps coming back writing and copying logs every 5 minutes or so even though it has very little activity. is there any good cleanup tool that can really keep all those hidden log files cleaned up??? or should i just go and expand the c drive to make it take longer to fill the drive up again???

windows-server-2012
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jiayaozhu-MSFT avatar image
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jiayaozhu-MSFT answered

Hi,

Thanks for your psoting!

1) I would appreciate it if you could tell me more about your demand. Based on your descriptions, you should use GPT since MBR only works with disks up to 2 TB in size.

"but why can' i change the new drive that has the system and c: drives to GPT? it has a total of 4 usable partitions now and still lots of unassigned space i might like to use but can't access as an mbr drive."

For the first question, can you give me more descriptions? Screenshots, error messages, etc.

For the second question, I can hardly understand why you mentioned MBR drive? Since based on your situation, you can only use GPT for your new drive.

2) The "Access Denied" in System Volume Information is not an error but a kind of protection way by design. It is occurred because the "C:\System Volume Information" is a system folder that is used from Windows to store information about the system restore points and by default this folder is not accessible by users. You can set your Windows to show hidden files and folders but you cannot open the folder because on drives formatted with the NTFS file system, this folder’s permissions are set to prevent everyone from accessing the folder, even users with Administrator permissions. Double-click the folder and you’ll see an error message saying the “location is not available” and “access is denied.” This is normal. Here is an article that can help you better understand system information volume folder:

https://www.howtogeek.com/282214/what-is-the-system-volume-information-folder-and-can-i-delete-it/

Please note: Information posted in the given link is hosted by a third party. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy and effectiveness of information.

And here is a blog which can guide you on how to set Windows to show hidden folders:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/049ccbcd-0ee8-4763-9dec-d87053821ec4/system-volume-information-access-denied?forum=ws2016

In addition, your c# dotnet app just run properly to read/write something in System Volume Information. It is normal for program like VSS (I am not sure how your app runs because it is not our product, I can only give you an example of our products) to store I/O in System Volume Information folder cause it is where VSS stores its backup files.

3) I want to ask which type of hardware disk you are using: HDD or SSD? If it is HDD, then this phenomenon just indicates that repairing to 28% fragmented can be its best practice. If you use SSD, then what kind of attachment you use, SATA or NVME? We need more information to analyze your issue.

4) This phenomenon is normal and is by design. You cannot delete logs unless you disable event log service. So you are suggested to expand the c drive, basically, we set our c drive larger than other drives for better performance. In addition, you can try to use dynamic disk which can help you have flexible partitions based on your usage condition. Here is an article about dynamic disk:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/basic-and-dynamic-disks

Above all, you basically do not have any issues with your disk. Have a nice day! : )

BR,
Joan


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Davek1ttt-8895 avatar image
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Davek1ttt-8895 answered
  1. i restored the backup of my old 1tb disk to the new 4tb one so it reproduced the configuration i had before which was ntfs mbr drive with 4 partitions, 350mb system, 100gb c:, 400gb e:, and 450gb f:. the new disk i added was initially formatted as ntfs mbr because i didn't know about the 2tb limit. when i found out about gpt i used the computer management/disk management app to change the new one to gpt. then i tried using it on the restored system disk the option is grayed out.

  2. i understand what the system volume information is supposed to be used for, i am curious why a desktop app that i wrote using visual studio 2019 in c# has access to it that i didn't program into it. The only disk access i expected this program to use is to read/write it's settings file which should be under my user profile... and yet while it is running it periodically shows up in the resource monitor reading and writing something in that directory that has 2 guid's as a file name. i am guessing that something in dotnet framework is storing some kind of information there, maybe ceip, or some kind of dotnet performance data????

  3. the two new drives are sata hdd as the mobo documentation says it doesn't support ssd.

  4. the logs i deleted or moved off the c: drive to make space were the archived logs... i.e. iis makes logs named extend123.log, extend124.log, etc... only the last one is open by iis for writing the lower numbered ones are old data and can be moved or deleted. what i am looking for is a tool or process that can find all the logs that can be deleted or moved and do something with them. the dhcp one is an example of a service that i found writing and copying logs ever few minutes that seemed much larger and were backed up much more frequently than necessary, and even when i tried turning them off they kept coming back.



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