956852 - Some Win8 64-bit machines running out of disk space

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations :: RelOps: General, task)

Description

[Armen [:armenzg]]

Attachment: Screenshot

Some Win8 64-bit machines are generating endless directories on the C drive and running out of disk.  I tried to look into the contents of such directories but I have not been able to use .\root, root or Administrator as the credentials to see the contents of it.

We have to figure out a way to clean this up.

A machine having this issue is t-w864-ix-113.

Comment 1

[Mark Cornmesser [:markco] OOO 2024/04/15]

Attachment: dir2.jpg

I was able to get into a few directories by trying to propagate permissions down form the OSDisk. This seemed to sparsely open up permissions. The contents of the few folders were much the same as the one attached, various KB cab files.Also by the naming of the folders I would guess they were supposed to be temporary.

Do we an approx number of machines this happening on, or do we have a list?

Comment 2

[Mark Cornmesser [:markco] OOO 2024/04/15]

What appears to be happening is the install_media_feature_pack, though already installed, it trying to continue to install the pack (KB2703761). On each fail attempt it is creating a temp folder with the .cab files. 

I was able to delete the majority of the files except for 6 of them. After performing a gpupdate /force another temp folder was created in the c directory. After removing the media pack gpo from the win 8 tester OU, no new temp folders were created. 

I think at this point we want to created a GPO to remove these temp folders. Which may be a bit tricky in itself. 

Also we may want to do the media pack install in the MDT deployment instead of through a GPO.

Comment 3

[Armen [:armenzg]]

Removing the temp folders would be awesome.

I don't know how many machines are affected, however, I would not be surprised if soon we start seeing more machines hitting this issue.

Do you know why the package is failing to install?

Thanks for looking into this so quickly.

Comment 4

[Mark Cornmesser [:markco] OOO 2024/04/15]

I think it is failing because it is already installed. For some reason on Windows 8 the GPO is trying to reapply itself. Though on the other OSes it only applied itself once.

Comment 5

[Q]

Found 36 machines affected to a noticeable degree. This was caused by a race condition with installing the media pack on an "N" version system. In some cases the machine would perform an offline wsus scan creating some large cab files as an index of installed updates. That was the contents of those  directories. Since the  media pack was already installed the install would fail and leave behind detritus.  A python script cleaned up the directories a clean.log with the results of the deletion can be found in C:\gpo_files\clean_mp_files on each machine. 

Mark is taking steps to roll the media pack into the base image to avoid this in the future.

Comment 6

[Armen [:armenzg]]

This is great!
Thanks Q & Mark for getting this killed so fast.
It's good to know that we won't be seeing this happening :)