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...
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.
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???
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???
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???