Disk full error in Word

[Marie_P]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

We are beginning to see numerous disk full error messages when trying to save documents (7 in the last week). We are running Leopard 10.5.5 and 10.5.6 and 12.1.5 of Office. I have seen the posts regarding document corruption, but am just a bit skeptical that so many people are suddenly working on corrupt documents, yet we can sometimes save new fake documents to the hard drive (but not always). In all cases we have been unable to save the original document that generated the error. Any suggestions?

 

[John McGhie]

For what it is worth (very little!!) the "Disk full" error is very rarely
due to document corruption.

It usually means "An attempt to write to disk failed." Often, it means Word
could not obtain an edit lock on that file name, and so couldn't write the
data to be saved.

This usually turns out to be a permissions issue. Either the user's Unix ID
is not unique, or the user does not have permission to write to the file, or
the user does not have permission to delete from the /temp folder in the
root of the destination drive. Or sometimes: the user's ownership
permissions are wrong on their home directory. You will see this error far
more often with network home directories.

It can also be a "timing" issue. If the network server is a little lazy
about "releasing" file locks, the next time Word tries to write, it will
fail.

If you google, you will find there are several strategies you can try, one
or more of which may work for you. I would try anything to do with Unix IDs
or network permissions or folder permissions first.

It's unlikely to be document corruption.

Hope this helps

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

We are beginning to see numerous disk full error messages when trying to save
documents (7 in the last week). We are running Leopard 10.5.5 and 10.5.6 and
12.1.5 of Office. I have seen the posts regarding document corruption, but am
just a bit skeptical that so many people are suddenly working on corrupt
documents, yet we can sometimes save new fake documents to the hard drive (but
not always). In all cases we have been unable to save the original document
that generated the error. Any suggestions?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[redough]

I, too, have started encountering the exact same jproblem. I have 2 users
who cannot save word or excel documents to the server. My other 10 users are
not having any issues. You mention it may be a permissions issue. Each of
my users belong to only one group, the Domain Users group. Should I have
them become members of another group? If so, which one do you suggest?

Thanks!
Richard

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Richard:

This issue has just begun to appear *again*. I am not at all convinced that
it's the same cause this time around. So I am not at all sure that any of
our old "fixes" are going to be of any help at all.

There was an issue with Word 2001 on OS 10.4 ‹ it would fail to release file
locks on its temporary until the server ran out of file handles. There is a
VBA utility around that can cause Word 2001 to close its temporary files,
thus releasing file handles back to the server.

There was an issue with an early edition of the Airport base station that
used to cause a transport problem that would produce this issue ‹ Apple put
out a firmware problem that fixed it.

There was an issue with OS X's network transport that caused Word 2004 to
suffer this issue. Reapplying the Apple Combo Update for OS 10.4 would fix
that one.

There was a bug in the Office 2008 installer that used to assign a Unix ID
of 502 when doing a network installation. Installations from the local CD
ROM would get the default 501 Unix ID and would not get the problem.

There was a bug with the original XML converter that would cause this issue
if it attempted to convert a corrupted Word 2008 document into the old .doc
format, but that was fixed in one of the first service packs.

Make sure the user's OS X and Office are both fully updated to the latest
patch levels.

There's a file "ownership" issue in OS 10.5 that causes Word 2008 to display
the problem. Sometimes using Disk Utility to "Repair Permissions" will fix
it. Sometimes, downloading and using the AppleJack utility will fix it.

When all else fails, creating a new user ID on the user's machine will
sometimes fix the issue. And if you're desperate, re-installing OS X will
often fix it. (Be careful: if you do an "Archive and Install" you need to
ensure that you do NOT allow it to restore the user's MICROSOFT preferences,
because that may be where the problem is.)

But since we do not know the cause, we really can't tell you how to fix it.
The problem we all have is that what you are seeing is a very old and
"generic" error message. It will appear when ANY write to disk fails for
whatever reason, unless it is displaced by a specific message from an error
handler that can trap and report the specific issue. If it's a new issue
the error handler can't trap, control falls through to the old error
message.

Back in the days when that message was created, the most likely problem was
that the floppy disk or hard disk you were trying to write to was full.
These days, that's the least likely cause. The message should really be
replaced with one that says "A write to disk failed. Check network and user
permissions." Which still wouldn't tell us what is wrong, but at least you
wouldn't be looking for disk space issues that don't exist!

Tonight, I asked the Microsoft developers (yet again...) to tell us what
this issue is. Sadly, they may not be able to tell us

Cheers

I, too, have started encountering the exact same jproblem. I have 2 users
who cannot save word or excel documents to the server. My other 10 users are
not having any issues. You mention it may be a permissions issue. Each of
my users belong to only one group, the Domain Users group. Should I have
them become members of another group? If so, which one do you suggest?

Thanks!
Richard

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Marie_P]

When we first saw the error I was not terribly concerned because I thought we knew how to handle it. So wrong. None of the previous fixes we have used over the years has worked, and this includes copy/paste minus last paragraph symbol; save in different file format; looking for temp files; and permissions repair. I was skeptical about permissions anyway since we could sometimes still write other files, just not the one we wanted. I am also surprised at the number of local users who are experiencing this, it is not just our nethome users. Hope you get some useful information from the developers soon. Thanks,

-Marie

 

[John McGhie]

Thanks Marie:

All I'm getting right now is a stunned silence...

They thought they had this one fixed!

I will prod them again...

My money is on a "permissions" or "deadlock" error on one of the temporary
files. When Word edits a document, it opens and locks up to 25 other files
as temporaries, which it uses as scratch pads for cut/paste/copy/sort and
data recovery.

I'll almost bet you that either one of them is not releasing correctly, or
that something else (e.g. Spotlight) is trying to open one while Word has it
locked.

When Word "saves" a file, it is not actually conducting a "Save" operation.
It does a write, rename, rename, rename, delete.

First it writes the new version to disk with a temporary name.

Then it renames the backup version to a temporary name.

Then it renames the current version to the backup name.

Finally, it renames the new version to the correct file name.

Finally, it deletes the "old, old" version.

It doesn't let go of some of the temporary files until the last application
that was the source or destination of a copy, closes the file into which you
copied. This can hold some temporary files open for literally days!

This method was developed back in the days when hardware was very slow and
unreliable: it is practically impossible for any hardware error during the
operation to take out the document. And on the old, slow, hardware of the
day (think: floppy disks) renaming is dramatically faster than performing
another file write.

But on a multi-threaded, multi-user operating system, all hell breaks loose
if something gets hold of one of the files Word wants.

Cheers

When we first saw the error I was not terribly concerned because I thought we
knew how to handle it. So wrong. None of the previous fixes we have used over
the years has worked, and this includes copy/paste minus last paragraph
symbol; save in different file format; looking for temp files; and permissions
repair. I was skeptical about permissions anyway since we could sometimes
still write other files, just not the one we wanted. I am also surprised at
the number of local users who are experiencing this, it is not just our
nethome users. Hope you get some useful information from the developers soon.
Thanks,

-Marie

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[caragd]

Thanks Marie:

All I'm getting right now is a stunned silence...

They thought they had this one fixed!

I will prod them again...

My money is on a "permissions" or "deadlock" error on one of the temporary
files.  When Word edits a document, it opens and locks up to 25 other files
as temporaries, which it uses as scratch pads for cut/paste/copy/sort and
data recovery.

I'll almost bet you that either one of them is not releasing correctly, or
that something else (e.g. Spotlight) is trying to open one while Word hasit
locked.

When Word "saves" a file, it is not actually conducting a "Save" operation.
It does a write, rename, rename, rename, delete.

First it writes the new version todiskwith a temporary name.

Then it renames the backup version to a temporary name.

Then it renames the current version to the backup name.

Finally, it renames the new version to the correct file name.

Finally, it deletes the "old, old" version.

It doesn't let go of some of the temporary files until the last application
that was the source or destination of a copy, closes the file into which you
copied.  This can hold some temporary files open for literally days!

This method was developed back in the days when hardware was very slow and
unreliable: it is practically impossible for any hardware error during the
operation to take out the document.  And on the old, slow, hardware of the
day (think: floppy disks) renaming is dramatically faster than performing
another file write.

But on a multi-threaded, multi-user operating system, all hell breaks loose
if something gets hold of one of the files Word wants.

Cheers




--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group.  Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia.   mailto:[email protected]

Hi John,

I contacted you a couple years ago regarding the Disk Full error.
I'm an IT Consultant in California with a small client that lately
is encountering the Disk Full errors more and more again. They
seemed to go away for a while, but now they're back in full force.

My question to you is: Would the problems potentially go away
if my client was running OS X Server as opposed to regular
OS X running something like Sharepoints software.

Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.

-Denny

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Denny:

Changing the server is unlikely to have any effect. I don't get the problem
connecting to Windows 2K3 servers. But I didn't get the problem connecting
to any other kind of server either.

I assume you have run through all the things suggested here?
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/CantSaveToServer.html

Sorry, but I have never managed to find out what really causes this error,
so I have no idea what to suggest. The error itself is not diagnostic: it
simply says "A write of a file to disk failed". It does not necessarily
mean the "Document" file, there can be around 20-25 temporary files also
open when Word has a document open. This error is a bottom-of-the-list
catch-all when Word has no idea what went wrong.

Cheers

Hi John,

I contacted you a couple years ago regarding the Disk Full error.
I'm an IT Consultant in California with a small client that lately
is encountering the Disk Full errors more and more again. They
seemed to go away for a while, but now they're back in full force.

My question to you is: Would the problems potentially go away
if my client was running OS X Server as opposed to regular
OS X running something like Sharepoints software.

Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.

-Denny

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]