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Problems writing to hard drive


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Oh all the little problems we seem to have with our servers. I haven't gotten to post about this one yet tho... It has been reliable for the most part. OK... here goes. We use the server as a file server and to run GhostCast (Symantec Ghost 7.5).

Friday, I go to capture an image to a specific folder (ie. d:\business\company1\mini) and Ghost errors out. I delete the files and capture again and get the same error. Symantec says this error is returned when the server (host) runs out of disk space. I check the amount of available disk space. It is 216GB. I test by making a text file in that folder and it works fine. In my hastiness, I upload the image to our low-end WDS. Today, I need to ghost up the image again but it has to be with Ghost (multi-volume with hidden recovery partition) so I don't have a choice. I upload and Ghost errors out. On a guess, I upload to another path (ie. d:\images) and the upload completes. So it leaves me wondering.

Here are the facts:

1. Ghost is reporting that there is no space on the hard drive.

2. Windows can report no space on the hard drive if it can't write to it.

3. Not being able to write to the drive may be caused by other things besides being full.

4. Drive is a RAID5.

5. 3Ware 3DM2 reports no errors or any sort

6. Images are at the most 2GB in spanned files (GHO and GHS)

Possibly, it there any problems regarding the amount of files in any one folder? As an example, the D: has 8 folders. 5 folders for storing images. Business, School, standard, vista, other. 3 folders have other things like drivers, software and some windows update things that got on there somehow.

But, the Business folder has 918GB of images in it. Is there any size limit for NTFS that may be making Windows balk at writing more data?

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The only thing I would think of is Ghost is hitting a limitation of it's file name depth (too many subfolders), as NTFS has this limitation as well. However, size shouldn't be a problem, although you might want to make sure you reboot before you come to any conclusions. Running out of paged pool memory (you'll see SRV/2020 errors in your system log, with maybe 333 errors as well) can cause these exact symptoms, as you can run into a situation where you can't create enough PTE pool allocations to write the file chunks out.

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The only thing I would think of is Ghost is hitting a limitation of it's file name depth (too many subfolders), as NTFS has this limitation as well. However, size shouldn't be a problem, although you might want to make sure you reboot before you come to any conclusions. Running out of paged pool memory (you'll see SRV/2020 errors in your system log, with maybe 333 errors as well) can cause these exact symptoms, as you can run into a situation where you can't create enough PTE pool allocations to write the file chunks out.

Can you post me some links that explain these limitations and features?

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The only thing I would think of is Ghost is hitting a limitation of it's file name depth (too many subfolders), as NTFS has this limitation as well. However, size shouldn't be a problem, although you might want to make sure you reboot before you come to any conclusions. Running out of paged pool memory (you'll see SRV/2020 errors in your system log, with maybe 333 errors as well) can cause these exact symptoms, as you can run into a situation where you can't create enough PTE pool allocations to write the file chunks out.

Can you post me some links that explain these limitations and features?

The limitation isn't in the NTFS filesystem itself (it can have as long a directory depth as you'd like), but most apps will balk at a specific limit (even the Windows properties dialog will balk working with folders that are a certain number of characters long for their strings). I guess I should try to be more concise when I post ;). Anyway, what I was getting at is that you could be having an issue where Ghost is failing to parse a tree down to a file, or, perhaps running out of kernel pool (thus a lack of PTEs to allocate new data).

This does seem odd though, in many ways.

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OK I do understand what you are saying. This is the 32bit version of Ghost that is running. While it doesn't put it into the Program Files (x86) folder, its process has the *32 next to its name in Task Manager.

The strange thing is that we always write to this folder, d:\business\companyname. It was always just this one company (5 character folder name) but today I am getting this error uploading to another company folder (7 character folder name). I can, however, write images to a folder right off the root, but seem to be having problems going 2 folders in.

I will do a test with our Vista Servicing disk (its a non-PXE way to load our PE). Its outdated but I should still be able to test writing an image up to that folder.

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