Knowledge Base

Cannot Compress a Drive with Little Free Space

Article ID: 153720

Article Last Modified on 11/1/2006

APPLIES TO

This article was previously published under Q153720

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: kbusage KB153720


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