WinSxS folder occupying huge space on the drive
In windows 2008 R2, there is will be low disk space on the
root directory on which the Windows operating system is installed. This may be
due to Winsxs directory occupying some huge space on the drive ranging few
GBs.
To brief about Winsxs , it is directory where all .dlls and library
components are stored. This is built on Side-By-Side technology (SxS) . Side-By-Side Assemblies are used by the operating system as fundamental units of
naming, binding, versioning, deployment, and configuration. The Winsxs folder
includes all manifests, optional components and 3rd party Win32 files.
Winsxstores multiple versions of a DLL in the WinSXS
subdirectory of the Windows directory, and loads them on demand and thus
reducing the dependency issues for application that needs SxS.
So for obvious reasons you cannot delete this directory or
move it elsewhere. It is also not advisable to delete anything inside the
folder as that could probably make your applications un-workable or even break
your system.
From Windows Vista , the operating system started using
WinSxS for its core components. To fix this
issue, Microsoft has built a tool to run and clear the disk space by few GBs.
Note: This process is available with Windows Vista, Windows
7 and Windows 2008 R2.
The procedure is the following:
- Install Windows Service Pack 1.
- Start and elevated command prompt (run 'CMD' as administrator).
- Run the DISM command:
DISM.exe /online /Cleanup-Image
/spsuperseded
- Wait for few minutes (may be upto 10 minutes max). When completed, “Service Pack Cleanup operation completed. The operation completed successfully” will be displayed.
Switches:
·
The /online switch tells DISM to work on the
running OS installation
·
The /spsuperseded option removes the backup
files created during installation.
Please note after running the above tool, you won’t
be able to uninstall Service pack from the operating system.
Check the disk space on the drive. Though it will not clear all the disk space used by WinSxs folder but will reduce the size by few GBs for sure.
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