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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T22:10:24+00:00

My application writes some bytes of data to an alternate data stream. This works

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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).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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.

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