What can be the reason for Windows error ERROR_DISK_FULL (112) when opening a NTFS alternate data stream?

Question

My application writes some bytes of data to an alternate data stream. This works fine on all but one machine (Windows Server 2003 SP2). Instead, CreateFile returns ERROR_DISK_FULL when I try to create an alternate data stream (on the root directory). I don't find the reason for this result, because...

• There's plenty of space on that drive.

• The drive is NTFS formatted (due to GetVolumeInformation).

• The drive supports altenate data streams (due to GetVolumeInformation).

Edit: I can provide some more information about what the reason not is: I added many streams on a test system which didn't show the error and wondered if the error might occur. It didn't. Instead after about 2000 Streams with long file names another error occurred and persisted: 1450 (ERROR_NO_SYSTEM_RESOURCES).

EDIT: Here is an example for one of the used file names:

char szStreamFileName[] = "C:\\:abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnoqrstuvwxyz012345";

EDIT: Our customer uses some corporate antivirus software from Avira on this server. Maybe this is the reason (Alternate data streams can be abused by malware).

Answer 1

After opening a support ticket at MS I know that there was a readonly flag set which one only can set (and reset) with undocumented Windows functions. Nobody knows who set this flag and why, but I sent them an image of the drive (after I got the machine from our customer) and so they figured it out. We only have a workaround in our application (We use another location if we detect this error). Meanwhile we know that some of our customers have this problem.

Answer 2

Are there any compressed/spare files or alternate data streams?

Often backup applications receive ERROR_DISK_FULL errors attempting to back up compressed files and this causes quite a bit of confusion when there are still several gigabytes of free space on the drive. Other issues may also occur when copying compressed files. The goal of this blog is to give the reader a more thorough understanding of what really happens when you compress NTFS files.

From Understanding NTFS Compression

Answer 3

Just a blind shot, but are the rights set properly?

Answer 4

Just another possibility...

Did you check the number of currently opend files in your OS? The OS support max. number of reserved file handles after that report ERROR_DISK_FULL or ERROR_NO_SYSTEM_RESOURCES.

And second possibility... The root directory is limited by number of files. As I remember 512 files in older versions of OS. But the NTFS support unlimited number of files in root!

Answer 5

You might want to see what something like Sysinternal's Process Monitor utility captures when trying to create this file - it show the return codes of various APIs involved in the I/O stack and one of them might give you a clue as to why 112 is being returned to you. Hopefully the level of detail in ProcMon is enough - if not, I imagine there are other, more detailed I/O trace facilities for Windows (but I don't know of them off the top of my head)

Answer 6

The filename you give is

char szStreamFileName[] = "C:\\:abcdefghijklm...

it starts with

C:\\:

Is that a typo on the post, or is there really a colon after the slash? I think thats a illegal filename.

Answer 7

If you try to copy a file greater than 2GB from another filesystem (NTFS) to FAT / FAT32 which has a 2GB limit you may see this error.