Anomaly creating/deleting directory with HD > 128GB

[comaz]

To WC/TC developers and experts:

I found an abnormal response time (about 3/4 secs) creating and deleting a directory with WC/TC on HD Western Digital 1800JB (180GB 7200rpm) formatted in two NTFS partitions (172 + 8 GB). I report a minor delay (about 1/2 secs) renaming a directory, while file creation/copying/deletion seems work normally.
I get the delay only on the larger partition.
I never had this anomaly with a large partition of 112GB fully filled (on HD 120GB).
System: P4 2GHz 850E 256MB running Win2k Srv.
I tested the HD and it seems not defective.
I don't have the delay making/erasing the directory with CMD or Explorer.

I hypothesize a kind of bug handling directory operations with very large partitions (> 128GB ?).
Somebody can confirm or check this problem ?
Thank you !
comaz

[ghisler(Author)]

Which virus scanner do you use?

[comaz]

Hi Ghisler,
I am happy to see your answers.
None, I don't like virus scanners. I use only PersFW.
Do you have any test to suggest me for analyzing the problem ?

[comaz]

hi ghisler
I am analyzing the problem and it seems related to abnormal wc/tc cpu and memory usage for doing directory operations on very large NTFS partitions, hypotethically > 128GB, under Win2kSP3.
on the same system, directory creation/deletion process on hd 120GB takes not significant additional memory, while same operation on hd 180GB allocates about 40MB ! of VM and a peek 98% CPU occupancy for 2/3 secs on a p4/2GHz. could you verify why ?
thank you
comaz

ps: a curiosity: why wc keeps so many (hundred) opened handles to key HKCU\SOFTWARE\Qualcomm\Eudora\LaunchManager ?

[ghisler(Author)]

I don't have such a large harddisk, but my code is the same for small and large harddisks, so I guess that there is a driver problem. I know that some BIOS versions have a 120 GB limit, so this may be causing your problems...

[comaz]

Hi,
The mother board bios of ASUS P4TE has native support for HD > 128GB, and Win2k too, some months ago included such support (if I remeber in SP3). In fact I get the full drive capacity both from BIOS and from OS.
I think you are right suspecting some strange driver or system api interaction with tc dir procedures, even if I cannot understand a so different behaviour of tc compared to cmd or explorer in creating a directory. Of course I don't know what it is exactly doing, and how.

[ghisler(Author)]

There is only one function to create a directory (called CreateDirectory), so I don't know what the Explorer would do differently...

[comaz]

Who knows...
Today's update: At present the abnormal behaviour seems disappeared, apparently after installing the n-th security patch from windowsupdate...
no more cpu occupacy, no memory usage, nor strange new thread creation & termination activity for deleting a directory ! everythings seems came back to normality.
I think Windows, at last, digested the new hard disk...

[ghisler(Author)]

Apparently many other people had the same problem also with other apps, so MS finally fixed it. Let's hope that the bug will not come back...

[JackFoo]

@comaz
Do you perhaps remeber what patch it was?

Thanks.

[comaz]

It was one of the latest, I think exactly the Q815021, that apparently should have just nothing to do with the hd problem... Fortunately, at present the problem did not reappear yet...
I hope it can be usefull.

[Lefteous]

The abnormal response time appears on my machine.
Windows XP SP1, all updates installed. Intel Application Accelerator 3.5 Raid Edition is installed.
The bug appears on every partition (smallest 15gb, largest 81gb). The hdd size is about 230gb (raid 0).

[jb]

I would install Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 released on 2003-06-19. It includes the Security Patch Q815021_W2K_sp4_x86_EN.EXE, although I doubt that this one has something to do with the problem at hand.

[Lefteous]

I would install Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 released on 2003-06-19. It includes the Security Patch Q815021_W2K_sp4_x86_EN.EXE, although I doubt that this one has something to do with the problem at hand.

I have Windows XP SP 1 with all patches (including Q815021) installed.
Windows 2000 SP 4 won't help here

[jb]

To Lefteous:
Sorry, I did not want to respond to you, but I missed that the previous posts are quite old.