WTF Windows pagefile? Why do you not go where I tell you?

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

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I'm on XP32 SP3 and I've set up a pagefile on a different physical drive to where I keep my OS installation, yet Windows still insists on keeping a copy of pagefile.sys 3.5GB in size on the same partition that it's sitting on!

I double- and triple-checked that that partition is set to "no paging file" in the System applet, and I experimented with both fixed-sized pagefiles and system-managed ones on the other drive, yet the other-drive pagefile.sys never exceeds 1.8GB, which suggests to me that the OS-partition copy is getting used more.

I tried to unlock and delete pagefile.sys from my OS partition, and the computer predictably BSOD'ed. I can't figure out why this is happening and how I can stop it!
 
That didn't work quite as I expected, I set the pagefile on the other drive as 10GB (which you'd think would be ample!), dropped the pagefile on the system partition to 128MB, but on reboot I got the "virtual memory too low" error message! In fact, the system applet reports total paging file for all drives as 128MB, even though when I open the Virtual Memory applet I still see the 10GB allocated on my E:\ drive!

Very bizarre! I'm starting to wonder if XP has an issue with SATA drives, or if there's some kind of problem with my other drive...
 
Well I read from several authoritative sources that to optimize your system's performance it's best for the pagefile to be on a different physical drive than the OS.
 
Aod said:
well, depending on the configuration of your system this may well be a problem. are your SATA drives attached to a software RAID controller (even if they aren't RAIDed)? or is your motherboard quite old? when windows starts to boot it needs the page file immediately, and if the "assigned" drive hasn't been initialised yet, which it wouldn't if it needs software-drivers or software initialisation, then windows has no choice but to put the page file in the boot drive.
for example, windows will happily let you set a USB HDD to have the page file but it will never actually be used because USB devices are only initialised after windows has booted.
Click to expand...
Right ok, that's some interesting info. The answer is, erm, probably!
I'm on a Gigabyte P35-DS3R. It's got 6 yellow SATA ports, which I understand are natively supported by the chipset, and 2 purple ports, which are apparently controlled by the Intel ICH8 chip next to them. I've got both HDDs hooked up to the yellow ones, since the purple ones weren't working at all until I installed the motherboard drivers and I needed a hard disk to install windows on. I'm sure they'd work fine now if I switched the HDDs to the purple ones, so I'll try that and see if it fixes the issue. And yes, I've got the onboard IDE/SATA controller set to IDE in the BIOS. If the issue is that Windows can't see the other drive's swapfile on bootup though then it won't be fixed by switching ports because the yellow ones that I've got them hooked into are initialised during POST, so Windows can certainly see them. I'll try anyway though.

I should note that the other drive's pagefile is STILL 1.8GBs, even though I've got it set to a fixed size of 10GB in System! (I also tried setting it to system managed, made no difference) So apparently Windows isn't using it AT ALL, not even after bootup!

And for everyone wondering why I bother, Vista and 7 use RAM much more aggressively, XP prefers putting things on the pagefile so there's a lot more disk-thrashing whenever I task-switch etc. :) Plus I'm still on the 32-bit version so I only have 3.5GBs of RAM effectively... :p I do plan to upgrade to something less ancient, I just won't have the time to reinstall Windows until September and I need to make it fast enough to be tolerable until then!
 
That's a clever little program that, thanks! But I'm more concerned about fixing my current problem cause it seems to indicate some kind of a serious problem, either with my drives or with my Windows installation. Deleted the USN journal and it had no effect, haven't gotten round to swapping round SATA ports yet though. Will report back when I do.
 
Allright you guys are gonna laugh, but I ran a CHKDSK on my C: drive (the system partition), it fixed some minor errors, and on the next reboot the pagefile on the other drive was FINALLY being used, as in I could resize it and the change in size would be reflected after a reboot!

The errors WERE something to do with the USN journal after all, which is even weirder as it's got nothing to do with the pagefile. Why would some minor USN log errors on one partition affect Windows's ability to keep a pagefile on a completely separate physical drive I have NO idea!
 
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