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Disk Usage (DU.exe): Wish there was a Like button

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My d:\ drive holds my Hyper-V virtual machines and their associated .VHD files. Well, out of 463 GB I got down to 34 GB free. Only in a VM-world can I fill 429 GB. Windows displays the disk in a lovely shade of red that I'm sure is yelling at me.

My goal is to see the directories and their file sizes. I remember doing this "back in the day", possibly on a Windows 2003 server. And, I know I used a SysInternals tool. So today I repeat what I did several years ago, which is to use Disk Usage (DU.exe) from SysInternals:

  1. On my Hyper-V server, download Disk Usage from SysInternals: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896651. It's a command line tool in zipped file. Extract it somewhere easy :).
  2. Open a command prompt as Administrator and go to this folder.
  3. Type: du.exe -v d:\ > Output.txt

Output.txt is created in the same folder as DU.exe. My output, minus the 0 byte directories:

15273000  d:\$RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-5-21-124525095-708259637-1543119021-56324
15273000  d:\$RECYCLE.BIN
16  d:\2009_2K8_64\2009_2K8_64
2327174  d:\2010_2K8R2_64\2010_2K8R2_64\Snapshots
21  d:\2010_2K8R2_64\2010_2K8R2_64\Virtual Machines
2327196  d:\2010_2K8R2_64\2010_2K8R2_64
43626034  d:\2010_2K8R2_64
2113673  d:\AppFabInt\AppFabricInt\Snapshots\AAEB8688-E663-48D5-8F1A-E6E068309FF7
2113691  d:\AppFabInt\AppFabricInt\Snapshots
17  d:\AppFabInt\AppFabricInt\Virtual Machines
2113709  d:\AppFabInt\AppFabricInt
128554684  d:\AppFabInt
1111068  d:\AppFabInt2k8\Snapshots\49A6BC5F-C34E-47B5-A915-BA8927CAE006
1111089  d:\AppFabInt2k8\Snapshots
20  d:\AppFabInt2k8\Virtual Machines
66737428  d:\AppFabInt2k8
6312388  d:\AppFabInt32\AppFabInt32\Virtual  Machines\2CF9EB33-3D24-4FED-864F-19C01C0B0785
6312409  d:\AppFabInt32\AppFabInt32\Virtual Machines
6312409  d:\AppFabInt32\AppFabInt32
85207650  d:\AppFabInt32
370196953  d:\

 

Nice, huh? This is what I did:

  • Emptied the Recycle Bin.
  • Directly on d:\, I stored OS .VHD file that I downloaded form an internal location. I deleted them since I haven't created a new VM in months.
  • In d:\AppFabInt, I had two snapshots. In Hyper-V Manager, I deleted the oldest snapshot. From what I can tell, deleting a snapshot automatically merges the snapshots, which could be bad.

Now, I have 125 GB free.

As an FYI on that Windows 2003 server, it was Dr. Watson logs that were causing the drama. I disabled the Dr. Watson logging, deleted the existing log files and the problem was fixed.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2012
    Mandi, just a little thing, but the sysinternals DU URL is borked. There's a trailing period in the href that's breaking it...

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2012
    Sorry about that. It's fixed now. Thanks for letting me know!

  • Anonymous
    September 11, 2012
    I'm using WinDirStat. Nice utility which shows the dir and file space in a super helpful picture, plus folder tree, etc.

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2014
    Even though I have extracted it, it says "du.exe is not recognised or external command, operable program  or a batch file ". Am I doing it wrong?

  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2014
    The comment has been removed