Help from the uber-geeks, please (windows server 2k3)

General Questions
#1

Over the weekend, I tried using robocopy, dos copy, and windows explorer to move a 50GB file from one SAN drive to another.
Each time, I received the message “Insufficient resources to complete the request” after it was about 80% of the way finished.

The server is an 8-way intel Xeon processor, with 16GB of RAM and 25GB pagefile.

The SAN had plenty of space.

I have found references to this regarding windows 2000, but even those refernces say the error should come up immediately as opposed to much later. I have found no results either via microsoft or newsgroups or google which can help me with this problem on Win 2003.

Anyone with more experience in this, could you help me out?

#2

I’m not an expert on 2003, but the first thing I would do is try increasing your pagefile. 16GB + 25GB = 41 GB, which is pretty darn close to 80% of the size of your 50 GB file.

#3

That shouldn’t matter unless they were copying the whole file into RAM before moving it, which would be amazingly stupid. Microsoft is bad, but they’re not that bad.

The built-in Windows file management routines have always seemed braindead. Why don’t you try transferring it via FTP, SSH or HTTP?

Just set up a server on the computer with the file on it, then connect to localhost, and download the file to the SAN drive.

Does your SAN device allow direct FTP access? That would be even easier.

I wonder what would happen if you wrote a C/Java/whatever program to transfer the bytes manually.

#4

Well, this is a production application server, and I was moving a DB around as part of some maintenance, so I didn’t really have time to turn it into an HTTP server. I’ll check into using FTP the next time, that might work, but I am really looking for a true “fix” to the problem, if anyone has heard of one.

I solved the problem by doing a database backup and then restoring it using the WITH MOVE option to move the file to a different drive. Thankfully, that was done easily enough this time, because I had the physical space to store a backup. Mi9ght not be so easy the next time.