As Eugene suggested, could you paste the output of "dfs -lsr" here so that we can see which dirs are owned by whom? A few other things we need to confirm: Is streaming being used before and after the upgrade? When you say compaction fails, what triggered the compaction? Is that triggered by the system automatically, or is it run by some user manually? If it's a manual compaction, then which user issued the command? You mentioned the problematic table partition was created on 2.5.3. Which user created it? Do you have issue compacting pre-existing tables created on 2.3.6? ... View more