free space problem with mounted drives

[ehkuso]

CopyToDvd does not work properly when creating images on mounted drives. Here is a real example.

Suppose I have an empty hard disk of 160 gigabytes capacity. This disk does NOT have a drive letter. It is mounted on a NTFS junction point c:\mount\empty160. The drive c: has only 2 gigabytes free. I try to create a 4 gigabyte image on c:\mount\empty160.

CopyToDvd reports there is not enough space because it is looking at the c: drive not at the actual target.

It looks to me like the programmers of CopyToDvd/BlindWrite have not done their homework on the NTFS file system are are not using the system calls that correctly report the free space on mounted drives. (For the record, this problem appears with BlindWrite 5.2.24.163.)

EHK

[Cougar_II]

Hi,

An official report was opened with VSO:

http://bugs.vso-software.fr/view.php?id=793

[ehkuso]

--10 points for the attitude

Perhaps I have an attitude problem, but as a 60-year-old specialist in Japanese history, I naturally tend to assume that professional programmers writing software for Windows ought to know more about things like the NTFS file system than I do.

Junctions were introduced with NTFS 3.0 which was introduced with Windows 2000. This capability has been available in the Windows environment for seven years now. It is not exactly something new. (*NIX operating systems have, of course, had a similar capability for the better part of three decades.)

As an addendum, I would note that I received a reply saying that the software would not work without a drive letter. This is incorrect. Using my example, CopyToDvd/BlindWrite will in fact create images on mounted drives provided that the drive hosting the mount point (junction) has free space greater than or equal to the size of the image.

The image is created on the mounted drive, but the software (incorrectly) reads the free space on the drive (partition) hosting the mount point (junction).

[ehkuso]

It looks to me like the programmers of CopyToDvd/BlindWrite have not done their homework...[/quote]

-10 points for the attitude :shock:

Personally, a big thanks for reporting the issue, but the rest was not necessary

-----

Perhaps, but I did a little checking today when I had some free time.

The fact that

Disk free space might not show up correctly. This depends on the API call the application is using. The old style GetDiskFreeSpace() function the Windows Explorer is using does only accept the root directory of a device and will therefore only show the amount of free space of the root volume. Reparse point-aware applications use GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() to determine the free disk space of the device of a specific directory.

is documented in sources no more esoteric than the Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

GetDiskFreeSpaceEx() is documented in numerous places including the Microsoft knowledge base article

Understanding and Using GetDiskFreeSpace and GetDiskFreeSpaceEx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231497

and numerous other articles.

It still looks to me like someone has (had) not down their homework.

EHK

[leon0909]

I had a really good read on this, very detail, and very useful information.
Thanks.

[Cougar_II]

Hi,

VSO will be releasing a new ßeta version soon and this above bug should have been solved, so it should be v4.0.4 when it's released publicly (Probably).

[CDR-Zone.COM]