Today, our disk space monitor reported a shortage of free space on one of our volumes. The SAN management console agreed there was little space left. Output from the 'dir' command showed that no files had been added to explain the deficiency. There are no volume shadow copies set up. There is no page file. This is a non-booting SAN Volume. Dir's output, shown below, indicated a total volume size of 608,161,824. Total Files Listed: 131 File(s) 154,177,568 bytes 27 Dir(s) 453,984,256 bytes free That is a mistake. The volume is 5GB in size. Before I move the SQL System Databases which reside on the volume and reformat, what do you think might account for this problem. The SAN management console for Equallogic agrees: we're almost out of disk space, with no file usage to account for it.

Have you run chkdsk on the drive? I'd backup before doing so. Regards, Dave Patrick .... Microsoft Certified Professional Microsoft MVP [Windows] Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees , and confers no rights.

Have you run chkdsk on the drive? I'd backup before doing so. Regards, Dave Patrick .... Microsoft Certified Professional Microsoft MVP [Windows] Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees , and confers no rights.

Have you run chkdsk on the drive? I'd backup before doing so. Regards, Dave Patrick .... Microsoft Certified Professional Microsoft MVP [Windows] Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees , and confers no rights.

On your Dell equalogic webpage do you set the volume as thin provisionned ? I never do as you will be never sure how big your volume will be. Thin provisionning is good if you are low on hdd space on your SAN When enabling thin provisioning on a volume, be aware of these issues: Unused space that was allocated to the volume is returned to free pool space. The volume reserve will decrease. Because the snapshot reserve, local replication reserve, and replica reserve are based on a percentage of the volume reserve, they will also decrease, unless the reduction will result in the deletion of snapshots. In this case, the snapshot reserve and local replication reserve will be set to a percentage that is sufficient to retain the existing snapshots. An event message will be generated if this occurs. MCP | MCTS 70-236: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring

On your Dell equalogic webpage do you set the volume as thin provisionned ? I never do as you will be never sure how big your volume will be. Thin provisionning is good if you are low on hdd space on your SAN When enabling thin provisioning on a volume, be aware of these issues: Unused space that was allocated to the volume is returned to free pool space. The volume reserve will decrease. Because the snapshot reserve, local replication reserve, and replica reserve are based on a percentage of the volume reserve, they will also decrease, unless the reduction will result in the deletion of snapshots. In this case, the snapshot reserve and local replication reserve will be set to a percentage that is sufficient to retain the existing snapshots. An event message will be generated if this occurs. MCP | MCTS 70-236: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring

The missing space was actually being used by a file that could not be found by dir. I needed to run an advanced find in the Windows Explorer to find a file that contained 4GB of nothing but error messages. A process was tryintg to logon to a sql instance -- with the wrong credentials-- every few seconds, and it just filled up the error log.