Your first step in dealing with SQLState = S1000 I/O error while writing a BCP data-file

The other day one job started to fail every time it ran. The error was

Server: FancyServerName 
Job: SomeJobName 
Step: Step 3) SomeStepName 
Message: Executed as user: SomeDomain\SomeServiceAccount. Starting copy... SQLState = S1000, NativeError = 0 Error = [Microsoft][ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server]I/O error while writing BCP data-file 19 rows copied. Network packet size (bytes): 4096 Clock Time (ms.) Total : 1 Average : (19000.00 rows per sec.). Process Exit Code 1. The step failed. 
Time: 2015-10-06 08:16:20


This was very interesting since the file we were writing had only 19 rows and this was very small, less than a kilobyte. So how do you investigate what the error is? It could be all kinds of things:


Permissions on the drive
Problems with the drive
Memory issues
Issue with a format file



If you do a search you will get all kinds of things back. However the first thing you need to run is the following

EXEC xp_fixeddrives

Here is what I saw after running xp_fixeddrives

drive      MB free
C             235644
D             1479234
E              10123
F              10123
G             10123
L              10123
S              117706
T              10123
Z              0

Take a look at the Z drive do you see that? The Z drive is full, there is no space left. It would be nice if the error message indicated that it couldn't write to the file because there was no space left. In a production environment this should not happen because hopefully you have something in place that sends out an alert if the drive is 90% full.

So, if you ever get this error, first thing you have to do is if you have space left on the drive.


I also want to point out that the xp_fixeddrives stored procedure is undocumented so there is no guarantee it will be available in a future version of SQL Server.