What does NTSTATUS 0xC0190037 (STATUS_CANT_BREAK_TRANSACTIONAL_DEPENDENCY) mean?

STATUS_CANT_BREAK_TRANSACTIONAL_DEPENDENCY

Another transaction has a dependency on this file-system property

STATUS_CANT_BREAK_TRANSACTIONAL_DEPENDENCY means the requested change would break a dependency that TxF is using to preserve transactional isolation. A property that looks local, such as an identity, link, or namespace relationship, may be part of another transaction's correctness guarantee.

Diagnose this by looking for transaction overlap rather than by only checking permissions. The operation may be valid when performed alone but invalid while a related transaction is still in doubt or active.

What to check

• Other active transactions that reference the same file, stream, directory entry, or file ID.
• Rename, delete, hard-link, or metadata changes that would alter a property another transaction relies on.
• Whether the dependency disappears after the other transaction commits or rolls back.
• Whether the application can serialize those changes or avoid TxF for this path.

Useful distinction

This is more specific than a generic transactional conflict. The named problem is a dependency that cannot be broken while TxF is preserving another transaction's view.

References

• Microsoft: About Transactional NTFS
• Microsoft: How to use Transactional NTFS
• Microsoft: Alternatives to using Transactional NTFS
• Microsoft Open Specifications: NTSTATUS values

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