Strangely massive cruft issue with 10.
So originally I never really thought about it as there was no need - or at least appeared to be no need - to check on the drive space situation. That is until I ran out of it in the office lab on Friday.
The original install footprint (x86pro) was IIRC in the 9GB range ... Which shouldn't have been an issue on the as provisioned 200GB partition. At least until I added 3 more, and tried running a maintenance routine to reclaim the space. So used space appeared as follows:
Original install size: 9GB
After build update (or 3): 25GB
After cleanmgr.exe run (set to kill): 12GB - but .vhdx will only compact to 22GB
After running
SDelete.exe -c (this is what overflowed the drive**) .vhdx compacted to 19GB
And finally - given the activation issues - I just deleted the damn thing, and clean installed onto a new .vhdx: 7GB <--???)
No additional software was ever added to the install, so it is only Windows 10 playing games with ~5GB of space. Where is it storing what and why?? The clean install has been running for 24hrs, and is still sitting at it's original ~7GB so I'm assuming it isn't the indexing service(s) using up the space. And trying to get a birds eye view with SpaceSniffer didn't yield anything useful in the way of what was using the space either.
**Minor caveat when running the
Sysinternals SDelete.exe tool, is that in the process of "Zeroing Out the Free Space" it will cause a Dynamically Expanding .vhdx to expand to its full configured size. So if you're overlapping the physical drive space by double-booking it ... This will byte you in the ass.
Thus ends todays episode of How to Learn From the Other Guy's F***ups.
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