Safely Delete Files From WINSXS

We started to run out of disk space on one of our production Windows Enterprise servers. This usually isn’t a huge deal with virtual machines, however this was on the c drive. Yes, I know those can be expanded too, however I wanted to do a little investigating before I just started dumping disk space to it.

I found that there were over 12 GB taken up by the c:\windows\winsxs directory. I did some checking around the internet and found a blog post (Clean up Winsxs on Windows 2008 R2 after SP1 install) that provided me with a way to cleanup the WINSXS directory in a way that was supported by Microsoft:

DISM.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /spsuperseded

Now, it didn’t totally clear out the directory, but it did reduced it down to only 5 GB.

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