Problem starting tasktracker in hadoop under windows
I was running into this issue on an installation of 1.0.3 on Windows server. I changed the default directory in hdfs-site.xml so that the directory that hadoop creates for the dfs is a subdir of the cygwin directory like this...
...
<property> <name>dfs.name.dir</name> <value>c:/cygwin/usr/mydir/dfs/logs</value> </property> <property> <name>dfs.data.dir</name> <value>c:/cygwin/usr/mydir/dfs/data</value> </property></configuration>This seemed to resolve the problem.
The apache documentation for the config files is here