Paging file too small death loop

Win2000 Sp3 worked fine until I reduced Paging file to minimum size in order to defrag. At some point -after several succesful re-boots (at least one) windows will boot to my wallpaper and then error message says (appx):

Paging file too small or non-existent, then gives instructions on how to change the paging file size. Click ok

When you click ok, hard drive works hard and then comes back to same useless message -looping forever.

Safe mode produces same useless message.

I was not able to find any solutions when I searched MS Knowledge base.

Any solutions?

Thanks

Dan

 

Dan is your file system NTFS or FAT32?

Sounds like you have a curupted pagefile. Even tho it says you have none, because it is supposed to rebuild it in full and should boot to safe mode without it.

If it is FAT32 boot from a win98 disk and delete the file pagefile.sys in the root of the boot drive.

This way
del c:\pagefile.sys

While here get these also!
del c:\winnt\prefetch\*.*
del c:\winnt\temp\*.*

If not fat32 try the following.

Does your computer have other users? If you are logging on as Dan try logging on as admininistrator in safe mode.

Get back to us!

Mike

 

Will try 2nd & 3rd solutions

I use FAT32 and I have already deleted -actually renamed the pagefile.sys (pagefile.ysy) , but it made no difference. Do you think renaming is functionally not as good as deleting???

I will now try to see if deleting

prefetch & temp in addition to renaming pagefile.sys

I never get to a logon screen --so I cannot try any other logons. Oops, this maybe because I used TweakUI to logon automatically.

I will let you know about the outcome.

Thanks very much

If I can't repair this problem it's not a very serious problem since I have a very recent Image Backup which I can restore, but it would be nice to see if there is a simple workaround esp for people w similar problem who do not have an image backup.

 

No luck!

I tried deleting those additional files -no luck.

Then I deleted the renamed pagefile.ysy

Just to be sure. Still get exact same stupid
looping nonsense.

So, I'm giving up --I will restore image backup.

Thanks for your effort!

 

Restore Works of course

Image restore put it all back.

Lesson is always make an image backup t o another partition or to CDR.

Thanks for your help.

Dan

 

Good morning Dan

Glad to hear you got it all working again.

Hope you lost nothing.

I feel you had some other problem here. I run FAT32 and I can just boot to DOS delete the pagefile.sys and it will give the warning you had and just recreate an empty pagefile.

So leave the settings alone but just do that next time.

Here is a utility that allows clearing the pagefile on shutdown. Plus some other nice features.

http://www.webattack.com/get/xpantispy.shtml

Although it says XP it also works for 2K. In XP it does have many more things to control.

Select Clear Pagefile on shutdown and any others you would like.
After the first reboot after you run XPAntiSpy go back to XpAntiSpy
and uncheck the clear Pagefile at shutdown, as we only want to clear it once.

Additionally you now have no SP3 if it was not in the backup. You should have this, but it needs to be done properly.

First cleanup good!

Then get startup control panel to get full control of startups then use it to turn everything off including virus scanners, firewalls, CD burning programs everything.

Startup control
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

Then do the SP3, then turn everything back on.

Mike

 

Thanks

I've downloaded it and will try it.

No, I did not lose anything -my image backup was only 3 days old and I keep my data and OS+apps on a different partition


I wonder if your suggestions did not work for me because of changes made by Drive Image for virtual booting?


Thanks very much

Dan