I did try a quick test on Windows (yes, some of us use Windows :) I thought simply changing the "dataDir" to the "/dev/null" equivalent on Windows would do the trick. It didn't work. It looks like a Java issue because I noticed inconsistencies in the File API regarding this. I wrote about it here - http://javaforu.blogspot.com/2010/07/devnull-on-windows.html devnull-on-windows .
BTW the Windows equivalent is "nul". This is the error I got on Windows (below). The mkdirs() returns false. As noted on my blog, it returns true for some cases. 2010-07-20 22:25:47,851 - FATAL [main:zookeeperserverm...@62] - Unexpected exception, exiting abnormally java.io.IOException: Unable to create data directory nul:\version-2 at org.apache.zookeeper.server.persistence.FileTxnSnapLog.<init>(FileTxnSnapLog.java:79) at org.apache.zookeeper.server.ZooKeeperServerMain.runFromConfig(ZooKeeperServerMain.java:102) at org.apache.zookeeper.server.ZooKeeperServerMain.initializeAndRun(ZooKeeperServerMain.java:85) at org.apache.zookeeper.server.ZooKeeperServerMain.main(ZooKeeperServerMain.java:51) at org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerMain.initializeAndRun(QuorumPeerMain.java:108) at org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerMain.main(QuorumPeerMain.java:76) Ashwin. -- View this message in context: http://zookeeper-user.578899.n2.nabble.com/ZK-recovery-questions-tp5310116p5319775.html Sent from the zookeeper-user mailing list archive at Nabble.com.