Windows 2003 System Restore Disabled

[yodaqs]

HI

On windows 2003 With R2 Service Pack 2, we have a problem with the
following symptoms:
- On All servers, In System Properties, there is no system restore Tab
- In Disk Cleanup/More options, System restore is Greyed out
- Some servers are consuming disk space on a daily basis in the
"System Volume information" folder. These files cannot be deleted
manually, get "file in use"

Thinking that we need to enable system restore in order to access the
cleanup functionality, The following has been done:
- There was a group policy on the domain to disable system restore,
These settings have been reversed.
- The policy has been deleted
- Group Policy modelling used to confirm settings applied
- GPresult used on servers used to confirm that settings applied
- Deleted Registry settings for System restore
- Restarted Windows
- Review Event logs for errors
- Install new server and join to domain, without antivirus or any
special software

I am finding a lot of references to system restore on Windows XP, but
not much about Server

[yodaqs]

On Dec 10, 11:54 am, yodaqs <yod...@gmail.com> wrote:
> HI
>
> On windows 2003 With R2 Service Pack 2, we have a problem with the
> following symptoms:
> - On All servers, In System Properties, there is no system restore Tab
> - In Disk Cleanup/More options, System restore is Greyed out
> - Some servers are consuming disk space on a daily basis in the
> "System Volume information" folder. These files cannot be deleted
> manually, get "file in use"
>
> Thinking that we need to enable system restore in order to access the
> cleanup functionality, The following has been done:
> - There was a group policy on the domain to disable system restore,
> These settings have been reversed.
> - The policy has been deleted
> - Group Policy modelling used to confirm settings applied
> - GPresult used on servers used to confirm that settings applied
> - Deleted Registry settings for System restore
> - Restarted Windows
> - Review Event logs for errors
> - Install new server and join to domain, without antivirus or any
> special software
>
> I am finding a lot of references to system restore on Windows XP, but
> not much about Server

OK, managed to solve half of the problem.

Microsoft Software Shadow Copy Provider creates a Volume Shadow copy
every time a system state backup is done, This server also had SQL
server installed. Even though the Scheduled Shadow copies were
disabled, it was still keeping the files because no limit was set. The
Shadow copies of the C: drive was being written to the d: drive, to
confuse the issue more. Once a limit was set, the files were deleted
instantly.