Low Virtual Memory prevents Boot to desktop

Windows XP system, no password set, but 2 users.

Boots as far as blank screen just before winlogon with error message

'System is low on Virtual Memory'

Boot will not proceed further, even in safe mode.

Any ideas?

 

It could be a bad RAM chip, a full hard drive, a virus, or an upgrade performed by one of the users, or a hard drive going bad!

Might try booting off a Bart's PE or Ultimate Boot CD and see if the page file system has been changed to an unacceptable number by one of the users!

Hope this helps!

 

Thanks for the suggestions

My first reaction was a full disk, yes there are viruses that fill up a drive.

Yes I have looked at it with Barts (and run check disk). Disk is fairly new and fine. 9GB used 60 odd GB free.

Renamed pagefile.sys with Barts, but that didn't cause any change.

Not thinking straight tonight (human virus infection) but need to access the XP system, not the PE system shown by Barts.

 

Hate to hear about your virus ( human ), but the only other thing that I can think of is booting off of one of the live Linux distributions to try and fix the problem!

 

Easy to boot off linux or other, but what do I do then ?

Can't see anything obviously wrong on the disk can't access the settings.

 

Sorry,

But we have reached the limits of what little bit that I know on this subject! I would have thought that the live Linux CD would have affored access to the system files, and the possibility to fix those. As for what files need to be changed/modified, I have no idea. Sorry to have wasted your time!

 

That's one thing you definitely haven't done. It's not a common problem I think 'little fingers' were allowed to access this one and inadvertantly changed this setting.

But I too have no clue how to get at this.

The net is also pretty vague. Best offer has been repair install!

So many thanks for trying.

 

Thanks plodr

Playing with the installed RAM can often trick a system into coming back from the grave.
Didn't work here though.

Couldn't waste any more time in the end so I moved the data onto a spare partition and did the nuclear option - a destructive clean install.

Checked it out for malware with the Trinity Rescue Kit - good guys give them a plug.

Would really like to find a way in for the future though as I'm sure I could have cured it if I could have got to the paging_executive key in the registry and the rest of Windows seemed fine.

 

studiot,

Should you find an answer to the question, please post in this thread! Your problem intrigued me, and I spent most of the day searching for a fix to no avail. The web was extremely vague as you mentioned! Glad that you got it working!

 

More information, since you ask.

System was an early 2006 Packard-Bell running XPSP2 with 512M RAM.

Original pagefile.sys = 680Mb
after deletion the pc created a replacement pagefile.sys = 280Mb.

System would boot as far as the screen with 'safe mode' in each corner, but instead of proceeding to the login screen, an message would come up to the effect that the system was low on VM and Windows was increasing it.

Clicking on cancel or OK with the mouse cleared the message, but after that nada.

I presume that some process was hogging the memory.
However 6 hours of scanning with all the firepower in the Trinity Kit didn't find anything in the virus/malware line.

I didn't try it, but i don't think simply replacing the registry with an earlier version, for instance the original one, would work as paging is enabled by default and the process would still be there.

If I could have got into the registry there is a key to disable paging

HKLM\system\currentcontrolset\control\sessionmanager\memorymanagement\disablepagingexecutive

Default value is zero, setting this to 1 would prevent paging.

But XP/Bart doesn't have regedit32, which can pull in external registries.

 

studiot,

Many thanks for your reply! I try to increase my knowledge a little each day, and this forum helps me to no end thanks to you and others! I'm going to continue the search as to how to edit the registry. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours!