Hello, My Winsxs firectory has grown to 7GB large and is sucking up the available space I have allocated to my C:\ drive. Is there anyway to delete the files out of this directory? TommyTommy Rotunno

Thanks for the info. It looks like there is no way to shrink that directory which is crazy. Microsoft really dropped the ball here, I have 7GB being taken up by that folder. Tommy Rotunno

Hi Tommy, Vista Service Pack 1 contains a binary called VSP1CLN.EXE, a tool that will make the Service Pack package permanent (not removable) on your system, and remove the RTM versions of all superseded components. http://sreekarun.livejournal.com/8015.htmlSreeSomeOne

But I am running Windows Server 2008 64bit not Vista.Tommy Rotunno

hi tommy, did you had a chance to go through my eariler post in which there is detailed info about winsxs and link to reduce the size of winsxs foldersainath Windows Driver Development

Hi Darrel, Explorer shows that my winsxs directory takes up 7GB of space. If most of that was not real due to hardlinks, then I would expect that the total used space for C: reported by Explorer would be larger than that reported by chkdsk, because it is counting gigabytes of phantom used space in winsxs. However, the numbers match with chkdsk, which leads me to believe that the 7GB number is correct, unless chkdsk itself is being fooled by hardlinks, in which case is there any way to know how much free space is left on my drive? Also, when I subtract the total used space reported by explorer from the size of my partition, it matches the free space reported by Windows on the partition. So, is the 7GB real or not? Thanks.

After much research, I understand that winsxs IS the operating system. However I would like to know whether all the amd* directories can be manually deleted since I have an x86 machine? It seems ridiculous to require us to just live with the system bloat for a processor we don't even have. SSDs are very expensive and would be nice to have for the boot drive, but having this directory constantly growing is just not right. Is there any way we can move it to a secondary drive and have the OS refer to it there?

Hello, I have gone through so many post regarding this. I found only one solution, that is: install service pack 1 or 2, and run the "compcln.exe" or what so ever! Now, I should say the only one solution i found is not the "solution". My winsxs folder is 3.89GB, and I want to reduce it, so I install services pack that require more than 5GB space!! after installation it can take 5+3.89=8.89GB, lets say I run the cmd.. will it reduced into 2GB? where as the pck itself need 5GB!! who knows how much it can reduce?? I better not install the pck 1 or 2...!! what is the use of installing the pck in this case? wasting time! I think, Microsoft engineers need to comes up with some tool that can reduce it!! Thank you

Hello, What OS are referring to and what is the size of your volume that the OS is installed to? What are you using to determine the size of folder and is it Hard-link aware? Can you try the Disk Usage tool from the sysinternals site? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx drop into a \tools folder C:\Tools>du /v /u c:\Windows >Win_Folders.txt Thanks, Darrell Gorter [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. VAMT - Volume Activation Management Tool - Download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec7156d2-2864-49ee-bfcb-777b898ad582&displaylang=en

I have Windows 2008 Server SP2. Other than the operating system, I have 3 or four application installed that are less than 7 GB. The total space allocated to the C drive is 65GB. Now I only have 1.6 GB free and I am running into space problems. the WINSXS file is about 20 GB and growing. This cannot be right. How do I stop losing space?

Hello, Can you try the Disk Usage tool from the sysinternals site? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx drop into a \tools folder C:\Tools>du /v /u c:\Windows >Win_Folders.txt Make this available so we can look at what is consuming spaceThanks, Darrell Gorter [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. VAMT - Volume Activation Management Tool - Download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec7156d2-2864-49ee-bfcb-777b898ad582&displaylang=en

I believe people are saying over and over what's big, and MS engineers should really take it seriously. WINSXS folders are taking large amount of space - way more than OS itself! I cannot believe what sort of engineers won't take this seriously, especialy ones who work on something which is supposed to be an "Enterprise Software". Is this the reason why MS OS is loosing the market share, and people are being more and more frustrated by Windows team? Installing windows takes ~4GB. Works perfectly fine initially. Than it start srawling, until it becomes useless. WinSXS folder now 7GB, entire Windows 11GB. Any reason for this? Any reason not to reduce the size, or optimize its usage? Imagine this when you multpiple it by 10, 20, 100 Servers? How much storage would you waist? How big your Windows OS disk needs to be to accomodate for an enteprize applicatino over few years of its production life-cycle? C'mon MS guys, I believe you're good engineers, I still believe in you and you can do it better - fix this thing, and don't just tell us by more storage, or faster machines. It won't work.

Same problem at our company. I don't see any difference in using treesize program or DU tool like suggeted above. TreeSize Professional Report, 21/02/2012 11:51 Drive: c$ on 'server' (Y:) Drive: Y:\ Size: 15.351,1 MB Used: 12.275,9 MB Free: 3.075,2 MB 4096 Bytes per Cluster (NTFS) Full Path Size Allocated Files Folders % of Parent Last Change Last Access Y:\ 12.993,4 MB 13.145,7 MB 84.978 15.747 100,0 % 21/02/2012 21/02/2012 Y:\Windows 11.526,7 MB 11.657,1 MB 68.106 11.640 88,7 % 21/02/2012 21/02/2012 Y:\Windows\winsxs 5.892,5 MB 5.958,1 MB 34.151 8.762 51,1 % 15/02/2012 21/10/2011 Y:\Windows\System32 3.847,1 MB 3.900,5 MB 26.742 1.525 33,5 % 21/02/2012 21/02/2012 output du /v /u c:\Windows below ... 21 c:\windows\winsxs\x86_xrxscan.inf.resources_31bf3856ad364e35_6.0.6001.18000_en-us_ef6ff684af922a40 6.033.955 c:\windows\winsxs 11.803.350 c:\windows Totals: Files: 68106 Directories: 11639 Size: 12.086.630.774 bytes Size on disk: 12.332.617.728 bytes Winsxs is 6GB large and I don't see any readon why ! It couldn't be that hard to make a good OS without draging all the file history with us from the installbase !? du /v /u c:\Windows

Microsoft needs to address this officially - not in forums. Is there a Microsoft document that addresses this? I have a lot of servers that are virtualized, taking up space on the SAN. All of these virtual servers are wasting disk. Either the reporting tools in the operating system are wrong, or the disk space is really tied up, but my monitoring systems think the disks are getting full, and as far as copying files, or installing patches go, the disk is seen as being full. I don't want to allocate a bunch of space on the SAN for this retarded misuse of disk. I generally create my Windows 2008 r2 virtual servers with a 25GB system volume, and that should be plenty. How it's filled up varies greatly among my servers, depending on what's installed. This is a bad one. It's an application server in a Sharepoint 2010 farm. Here's the DU output, first on c:\windows, then on c:\. Is Microsoft telling me that I don't need to worry about this drive reporting that it only has 300M free now because these are duplicate files? 11,989,370 c:\windows\winsxs 22,389,288 c:\windows Totals: Files: 88149 Directories: 21478 Size: 22,926,631,423 bytes Size on disk: 23,216,680,960 bytes 11,989,370 c:\Windows\winsxs 22,392,247 c:\Windows 24,460,789 c:\ Totals: Files: 104420 Directories: 24074 Size: 25,047,848,628 bytes Size on disk: 25,271,861,312 bytes Tommy

I also stumbled over this winsxs and disk space problem. MS states in their system requirements for W8K that minimum disk space is 10GB. I think they should update their document because this is only for installing W8K not running it and keeping it updated. If you want to keep your system up-to-date then the 10GB isn't minimum but its 20-30-40 GB? We have internal CA running on W8K and ignorant as I was I installed it on 15GB partition because there wasn't any other application planned on this server. And now after a couple years I have some 700MB free and I must start planning for disk expansion(luckily its virual machine and we have partiton management tool for that). And MS really don't mention that W8K installation is supposed to grow that much and you should plan according your server installation according to this because there is no way to delete old updates and reduce the size of windows installation.

Time does not stop, and I am still looking for a solution about this issue. We have 30+ Windows 2008 R2 servers. We have 50GB disks for System drive and winsxs is using at least 20% of it!!! I read a lot about winsxs and no one knows for sure how to eliminate it or at least make it smaller. Come on Microsoft, give us a solution for this. SAN disks are too expensive to be wasted for something we dont really need!Diego de Azevedo IT Analyst - MCSE, MCITP

Time does not stop, and I am still looking for a solution about this issue. We have 30+ Windows 2008 R2 servers. We have 50GB disks for System drive and winsxs is using at least 20% of it!!! I read a lot about winsxs and no one knows for sure how to eliminate it or at least make it smaller. Come on Microsoft, give us a solution for this. SAN disks are too expensive to be wasted for something we dont really need! Diego de Azevedo IT Analyst - MCSE, MCITP If Service Pack is installed on 2008 R2 Servers, you can use following command to free up some space dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded [use elevated cmd (run as Administrator)] Also, please refer following discussion Dism command in windows 2008 SP2 http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/75b7edb0-4bb2-4337-af23-85e3ff179d92A UNIVERSE without WINDOWS is CHAOS ! This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees and confers no rights. About Me ?

let's face it, this is an administrators nightmare. I don't really care if "nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a hard link to the physical files elsewhere on the system", in fact I'm tired of seeing this posted when people are experiencing real difficulties with HDD space - this is like telling a dying man "Cancer is a terrible thing and can attack any part of any person".... we KNOW all this but strangely, regurgitating it until it becomes hackneyed and tired is NOT a technical solution and doesn't clear any space on a servers struggling disks. I tried explaining to a furious Service Manager that the reason the critical system, accessed by around 3500 users nationwide, was unavailable in the middle of the night was because the server had received a set of updates which together with the 'hard links' had pushed the box over the edge. How surprised was I when instead of 'Oh I see, so it could be a misrepresentation in the amount of diskspace used due to a potential doubling up of the file usage reported by the O/S - thats OK' I received a less 'understanding' reply I know I have the option to run dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded and believe me, I have tried it - failed with different errors on different servers (the most ironic being ' Service Pack Cleanup can't proceed: No service pack backup files were found. The operation completed successfully.) why were no service pack backup files found... the $ServicePackUninstall folder was removed by an engineer awoken at 3:00am by Operational Support to resolve an unavailable service, and if dism doesn't reference this folder, then it has failed epically and NOT completed successfully as reported by the O/S Here's a question I cannot find an answer to - if the space usage is doubled up, does the O/S recognise this and allow data to be written to the diskspace 'used' by the phantom files? ie am I to expecting to see: Total DiskSize 60Gb Used 65Gb if not, then the 'hard link' thing really IS the worlds most useless piece of IT information - we know what the problem is, we know what causes it, we know that it's affecting millions of devices around the world....but there is nothing that can be done :( What I would like to see is a solution that works properly and allows my O/S to function as happily, a year down the line, as it did when first installed when it used around 9Gb instead of 24Gb .... any takers??

Hello, The real question is what is occupying the space on the machine. yes something is occupying the space but it's likely not the winsxs that is causing the issue, the growth is likely in a lot of different folders different for different people. Can you try the Disk Usage tool from the sysinternals site? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx drop into a \tools folder then run C:\Tools>du /v /u c:\ >Files.txt Make the output available. This will help target what folders are really occupying space on the systemThanks, Darrell Gorter [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. VAMT - Volume Activation Management Tool - Download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec7156d2-2864-49ee-bfcb-777b898ad582&displaylang=en

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 With All Important Patches built from an ISO with SP1 in it. 9,329,116 c:\Windows\winsxs That is a significant amount of space to give up in a VM. Edit: This is from du /v /u.

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 With All Important Patches built from an ISO with SP1 in it. 9,329,116 c:\Windows\winsxs That is a significant amount of space to give up in a VM.http://www.saberman.com

Did anyone ever create a case in Microsoft Connect? Yes, this is a problem. Yes, hard-links explanation is an ignorant response from MS support. Yes, server ARE being affected b/c what is reported is what is used by the OS to determine if it can write to a disk. I have 200+ Hyper-V VM's... many of which are 2008 R1. I have winsxs directories ranging from 5GB to 20GB. The VHD's for the VM's are dynamic disks. I had a server run out of disk space b/c of the WINSXS folder growth. I looked at the VHD. It had expanded to 101% of the allocated space. This means hard-links is fruitless and actual space is being used. Is the solution to reinstall? No. But this is probably a conspiracy to force upgrades to R2 to flush out the winsxs growth. Afterall, they have a space recovery tool for R2 :)

Hello, Do you have the data I requested from the images or installations with the issue? Can you try the Disk Usage tool from the sysinternals site? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx drop into a \tools folder then run C:\Tools>du /v /u c:\ >Files.txt Make the output available. This will help target what folders are occupying space on the systemThanks, Darrell Gorter [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. VAMT - Volume Activation Management Tool - Download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec7156d2-2864-49ee-bfcb-777b898ad582&displaylang=en

If you can provide a location to drop off the file, I have one ready for you. I cannot post here, too large. A snippet here. 13,009,429 c:\Windows\winsxs 24,100,664 c:\Windows 29,386,214 c:\ Totals: Files: 102068 Directories: 23892 Size: 30,091,483,580 bytes Size on disk: 30,146,105,440 bytes

Hello, Do you have a skydrive account or could you get one and post it there? Can you zip the file up and then email it to me? First Name and Last Name initial at Microsoft.comThanks, Darrell Gorter [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. VAMT - Volume Activation Management Tool - Download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec7156d2-2864-49ee-bfcb-777b898ad582&displaylang=en

I have forwarded you the details @microsoft.com

win8 - and what they fixed: nothing, same damn big folder, and without start menu ;/

Hello Millertime78, Hmm I have not seen it yet. How big was the file? darrellg [delete this] @microsoft.com Thanks, Darrell Gorter [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. VAMT - Volume Activation Management Tool - Download link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec7156d2-2864-49ee-bfcb-777b898ad582&displaylang=en