Pagefile on Wrong Drive

[nychojin]

I have a laptop running Windows XP Professional with NTFS. I previously created a swapfile on a secondary removable hard drive, and it has previously worked without a problem. However, it started to notice issues when I swapped out the removable hard drive for a second battery during a long trip.

Naturally, when the drive was removed, I received the "Limited Virtual Memory" notification, which was fine. Unfortunately, when I tried to change the location of the pagefile to the boot drive, I still received the same error message. I put back the second drive and the machine worked as normal.

After setting the system to run with no paging files, I then rebooted in safe mode, entered in as Administrator, checked to verify that I had full access rights to the system, then went to Windows Explorer and deleted pagefile.sys from the secondary drive. I opened Control Panel and set a paging file for the boot drive, then opened the system registry to verify the settings. I rebooted at the swapfile was still on the secondary drive. I opened Control Panel and it lists the page file on the boot drive.

It seems like no matter what I do, the system still places the file on the secondary drive, even though the operating system points to the boot drive. Any suggestions to correct this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[nychojin]

Any ideas anyone?

 

[bcastner]

With regedit, browse to the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

In the right pane of the Registry Editor window, double-click PagingFiles.
In the Value data box, edit the first numeric value after c:\pagefile.sys (where c: is the drive on which the pagefile is stored) to increase it to a number that is at least 1 MB greater than the amount of physical memory in the computer.

NOTE: Do not type a number that is greater than the amount of free hard disk space on the computer.

For example, the following value displays a minimum paging file size of 130 MB and a maximum paging file size of 256 MB.
c:\pagefile.sys 130 256

Reboot into Safe Mode as the Administrator, and remove the pagefile from Drive D:.

Reboot into normal mode.

 

[nychojin]

Actually, I've tried that. After I deleted the pagfile from the second drive and rebooted the machine, the pagefile was loaded back onto the second drive. I opened the registry and the settings were still on the root drive.

Any suggestions?