filesystem does not allow ln to create bad symbolic link

[coreutils]

I have an account on a shared host (for wordpress) - not clear which version of 
linux (see after my sig).
I'm trying to untar several tar archives. Some of the sym links are bad until
all of the archives are untarred.

I do not have root access, it's a large unknown filesystem - see df output.

The problem - ln refuses to create a bad symbolic link!
Has anyone run into this before?  My install script depends on untarring a few 
bad sym links,
which get resolved later in that script.  This script has worked fine for me on 
a dozen or so centos,
fedora, or umbuntu hosts for years.

Any comments appreciated.  Appears I have to rewrite the script to untar all the
sym link target files first -- aaargh.

--
thanks,
Tom
--

$ cd /tmp
$ mktemp -d XXX
9ml
$ cd 9ml
$ ln -s not-there badlink
ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘badlink’: No such file or directory
$ df .
df: Warning: cannot read table of mounted file systems: No such file or 
directory
Filesystem      1K-blocks      Used  Available Use% Mounted on
-              1848231292 358987172 1395335948  21% /
$ uname -a
Linux slmp-550-137.slc.westdc.net 3.10.0-614.10.2.lve1.4.55.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP 
Tue Jun 20 08:59:12 EDT 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ ln --version
ln (GNU coreutils) 8.22
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Mike Parker and David MacKenzie.