Large Number of Mounts/Dismounts on an NTFS Partition Causes a Memory Leak

A system may leak nonpageable memory when a large amount of mounts and dismounts are done on an NTFS partition.

The driver Ntfs.sys does not keep track of a VPB structure if a dismount request is followed by an unlock request. The memory leak is small, so the problem will usually appear after a period of days. POOLMON can be used to check this problem. Look for the NtfV tag taking up a lot of the nonpageable memory. Performance Monitor can also be used to monitor nonpageable memory use.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows NT 4.0. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Windows NT version 4.0. This problem was first corrected in Windows NT version 4.0 Service Pack 5.