Insufficient Disk Space for US Service Pack 1 for Windows NT

• Microsoft Windows NT operating system version 3.1
• Microsoft Windows NT Advanced Server version 3.1

SUMMARY

When you run UPDATE.EXE from US Service Pack 1 for Windows NT and Windows NT Advanced Server version 3.1, the update program does not check the drive that Windows NT is installed on for free space. This can result in a critical error which causes the update to fail. At this point, the only option is to increase the free space on the drive by removing files or moving files to another drive, and running the update a second time.

MORE INFORMATION

The amount of space required by the update varies from system to system, because only those files that are already installed on the system will actually be replaced. The maximum amount of files to be copied is just under 12 MB of free disk space on the partition containing the %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32 directory. There must also be enough space (about 150K) on the boot drive to replace NTLDR. Note that this free space is only needed during the update process itself. After the update program is finished, the system restarts and replaces the old copies of the files with the updated versions. At this point, all disk space used by the update program will be free.

If the update program does run out of disk space when it is copying files, you will receive the following critical error message:

  A critical error has occurred

  The destination disk is full

You will be given two options at this point: Retry and Exit. If you choose Retry, the update attempts the file copy again and returns the same critical error. If you choose Exit, Setup will stop. At this point, you need to free up disk space by moving or deleting files.