Win 2000 Pro Virtual Memory Issue

"Your system has no paging file or paging file is too small" is the basic error window that I get when I log on to a friends computer.

This machine is really old. It has a Pentium Pro processor and 128 mb of RAM. It had a SCSI drive installed with SCSI controller but I ghost imaged the 2000 Pro original to an IDE hard drive. I did this so that I could work with it using other utilities that I could not use with the SCSI drive because of driver issues.

So what happens is, when I log on as administrator in Safe Mode, it says loading personal settings and then pops up the system error window with a red x saying what I stated above. Then I click OK and go on my merry way until I realize that the computer beeps and I am back at the login screen. No reboot just the login prompt all over again.

I can't even get to the desktop in safe mode or in a normal login to Windows.

Need help with this. I looked and searched the forum and all I could come up with was that the page file.xxx or whatever is corrupt or missing. If so where do I go from that point?

 

Maybe your page file is too small. To adjust (or at least view) the Page Size:

1. Open System in Control Panel.
2. On the Advanced tab, click Performance Options, and under Virtual memory, click Change.
3. In the Drive list, click the drive that contains the paging file you want to change.
4. Under Paging file size for selected drive, type a new paging file size in megabytes in the Initial size (MB) or Maximum size (MB) box, and then click Set.

A popularly viewed rule of thumb is to set the page file to at least 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM installed on the system. If it's already set to at least 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM, you may need to increase the page file size. Try larger sizes to see if the problem disappears but keep in mind that the page file uses your hard drive as virtual memory so whatever size you set the Page File to is the amount of space you will lose to be used as virtual memory; which is not a bad thing as long as you have the extra hard drive space to spare.

 

I would love to be able to change the PF. As soon as I login I get the error message and then it makes me have to logon again in a vicious cycle.

Can't get to system properties. Can't get to my computer. Can't get to the page filing window.

 

Does the same thing happen if you login in safe mode?

 

To boot from a SCSI or IDE drive you need different entries in boot.ini

 

Yes, I thought safe mode would allow me to do what I needed to do so I have been troubleshooting in safe mode. Yes it does the same thing in safe mode. Well not the exact same thing. It's a friends computer that was set up on a domain. If you boot up it will try to automatically log on to a domain because it is not networked right now. So it sees that no network connections are present and boots to the "guest" account. Then it starts to cycle through the login with the PF error window. In safe mode at least I am able to login under administrator, or whatever account I need to. Then after you enter the admin pw, it begins cycling back to the logon prompt because of the PF error message. Not sure how to work this out.

I thought I would try locating the PF system folder by hooking the hard drive to anther computer and browsing around. Just not sure what I need to look for after I find it. I am hoping I can just get this login issue done with and edit the Page Filing and have a working computer for my friend.

 

Do the entries depend on the type of hardware you have?

 

Thought I had a break through for a moment. I used my WinPE boot CD to boot up the hard drive I'm working on. I used the WinPE Desktop to go into My Computer Properties. From there I added Page Filing to Drive C:. It told me that there was already a pagefile.sys that existed and asked if I would like to overwrite the file. I told the system yes and did so. I even opened up the system files and saw that the file had been modified as of 1-16-2008. I pulled the hard drive from that system and booted in the original machine. Found out to no luck that I would recieve the same message again "No Page Filie exists or Page File is Too Low".

 

To boot from an IDE drive boot.ini contains the line or similar

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\winnt="microsoft windows 2000 professional "/fastdetect

To boot from a SCSI disk use the line

scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\winnt="windows 2000 professional"

If you are making a floppy to boot a SCSI pc you need to copy
NTbootDD.sys
to the floppy in adddition to the usual
NTLDR and NTdetect.com and boot.ini files.

You can safely delete pagefile.sys using another system or OS.

Windows should recreate a new one upon restart.

However it is possible to set the paging file to another hard drive or several hard drives or even no paging file at all. So you may find the pc is looking for a non existant (network) drive for its paging file. Windows has a complicated algorithm for choosing the 'correct' paging file if there are several on different drives. However things can go wrong. Having no paging file on the boot drive prevents debugging STOP errors.

The bad news is that to set up the paging file(s) needs to be done from within windows.

systemproperties>advancedtab>performanceoptions>virtualmemorychangebutton

You may be able to recover from a problem by changing the registry with regedit32

HKLM\system\currentcontrolset\control\sessionmanager\memorymanagement

the location is specified here.
Also look at the DWORD 'clearpagefileatshutdown' 1=yes 0(default) =no

 

Good stuff studiot.

At work right now. I'll look at the system later on.