This appears to be a common issue that was addressed here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DRILL-1907
Adam Gilmore <https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ViewProfile.jspa?name=dragoncurve> added a comment - 08/Jan/15 05:30 Fixed it - basically it's a problem that, by default, Drill tries to use "/tmp" as the temporary path for storing its system databases (like storage plugin registration etc.) Of course, on Windows, this doesn't exist. The fix is to copy the drill-override-example.conf to drill-override.conf and then modify all occurrences of /tmp/ to be c:\\temp This really needs to be added to the documentation, or another workaround for Windows put in place.
