Stop Msg: C0000218 "Unknown Hard Error" When Registry is Overrun

• Microsoft Windows NT Workstation version 3.5
• Microsoft Windows NT Server version 3.5

SYMPTOMS

When you add users and groups to an Windows NT version 3.5 computer using User Manager you have the ability to overrun the registry with user and group information. When you reboot your computer, the following stop screen appears:

   Stop 0xc0000218 (0xe11a30e8, 0x00000000, 0x000000000, 0x00000000)
   Unknown Hard Error

CAUSE

User accounts and group information are stored in a secure location in the registry. By default, RSL (registry size limit) is 25% of the size of paged pool. The registry charges registry quota for its memory allocations. This is to prevent the registry from becoming too large for the available system resources. If a piece of registry is freed up, it is deallocated from the pool and the registry quota is returned. Although the space is still allocated in the file, there is no memory allocated, so no quota is charged.

If the registry becomes very fragmented, its file size may become much larger than the charged registry quota, potentially causing the registry to become larger than the system can accommodate at boot time. That is, the registry file cannot fit in memory in the available paged pool.

RESOLUTION

To address fragmentation, the Windows NT registry now continues to charge quota for portions of the registry that have been deallocated from pool, but are still allocated in the file. This prevents the size of the registry's files from exceeding the allowable registry quota, ensuring the file will fit in memory on the next reboot.

Additionally, a change was made that provides better coalescing of small portions of free registry memory into larger pieces when very large registry allocations are required.

With this change, instead of overrunning the registry with user and group information, when the registry reaches it's maximum allocation the following error message appears:

   Not enough server storage to process this command

   ARTICLE-ID: Q126401
   TITLE     : Err Msg: Not Enough Server Storage is Available to Process..

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT version 3.5. This problem has been corrected in the latest U.S. Service Pack for Windows NT version 3.5. For information on obtaining the Service Pack, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

   S E R V P A C K