Disk Full and Crashing: How to Urgently Recover Windows Disk Space

Sometimes, you come across Windows machines that are crashing because they’ve run out of disk space. And even after you do the regular cleanup, it either fills up quickly or you need more space. Here’s something to add to your arsenal.

A .dmp files

Look for .dmp files. Use powershell to search for all dmp files and delete them.

B .msp files

There are these .msp files which are Windows Installer Patch files. There’s a high chance that some have been orphaned and Windows doesn’t delete them. Run the following in an elevated powershell window. We ran this on a three year old Windows machine and recovered 20GB, enough to give you time to get a new SSD or go through the documents.¹

1: Check total size of the Windows Installer folder

"{0:N2} GB" -f ((Get-ChildItem "C:\Windows\Installer" -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum).Sum / 1GB)

2: Identify orphaned .msp files not registered to any installed product

$orphanedMsp = Get-ChildItem "C:\Windows\Installer" -Filter *.msp |
    Where-Object {
        $path = $_.FullName
        $found = $false
        Get-ChildItem "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData" -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
            Where-Object { $_.GetValueNames() -contains "LocalPackage" } |
            ForEach-Object { if ($_.GetValue("LocalPackage") -eq $path) { $found = $true } }
        -not $found
    }

3: Report how many orphaned files were found and their total size

$orphanedMsp | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum | Select-Object Count, @{N="GB";E={"{0:N2}" -f ($_.Sum/1GB)}}

4: Move orphaned .msp files to a safe backup location first

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path "C:\temp\patch_backup" -Force
$orphanedMsp | Move-Item -Destination "C:\temp\patch_backup" -Verbose

5: Verify the move was successful

(Get-ChildItem "C:\temp\patch_backup").Count

6: Once satisfied, permanently delete them to reclaim the space

Remove-Item "C:\temp\patch_backup\*.msp" -Verbose

7: Confirm free space recovered

Get-PSDrive C | Select-Object Used, Free

Note

• Always use WinDirStat to get the state of disk usage first.

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