Cannot Compress a Drive with Little Free Space

Last reviewed: August 13, 1997
Article ID: Q153720

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Windows NT Workstation versions 3.51 and 4.0
Microsoft Windows NT Server versions 3.51 and 4.0

SYMPTOMS

When you attempt to compress a volume that is very low on free space, the following dialog box may be displayed:

   Compression Error
   File Manager/Explorer cannot change compress attributes for:
   "path\filename"

Or, if you are running Compact from the command line, the following message may appear:

   "path\filename": There is not enough space on the disk.

CAUSE

This behavior is by design. The system needs some additional free space to do a compression. The system is not designed to manipulate the data in place on the disk. Additional space is needed to buffer the user data and to possibly hold additional file system meta data. The amount of additional free space required will depend on the cluster size, file size and available space.

Additional query words: Compact
Keywords : ntfilesys NTSrvWkst kbusage
Version : 3.51 4.0
Platform : winnt

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Last reviewed: August 13, 1997
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