Troubleshoot Page File Conflict and Fix

[AtlBo]

Had some time a couple of months ago so I moved the page file onto a 12 GB partition on the main drive. Set the partition to system managed and then turned off paging for all the other drives. With Windows 7, Windows uses the drive set to system managed for the whole system, so it automatically created a new page file on the partition and started to use that instead of the old one on the C partition. Well, yesterdary, I decided I would try moving the page file to a secondary drive even though that drive is not a 6GB drive (main is a 6 GB standard disk drive) after reading again why it's not a good idea to use a partition on the main drive for paging. Simple I thought, so I quickly switched the Windows setting over to a new partition on the remote drive in the case and happily rebooted to activate the setting. Not such a good idea as it turns out.

I never determined exactly what went wrong. I do know there were two page files on the system, one on the main drive partition and one on the secondary partition. I do know the PC would not boot no matter what I tried. I even restored an image of the main drive from the previous day but still no boot. So, I looked around for answers and when nothing worked I decided I try one thing that crossed my mind earlier. That was simply now that I had restored an image to before the change to delete the new partition that had the newer page file. O/C that worked, so it must be that a page file on more than one drive will confuse Windows 7 during boot time. Cost me a couple of hours. Oh well.

Now the question is how to do this without breaking the boot...and do I have the courage to try? I probably will, but I think this time I will turn off paging and reboot and then delete the page file on the partition or just delete the partition and combine it with the main one. Then I can create the new partition and change the setting to see what happens with another restart I guess. I suspect it will work but who knows. Think I will put it off a couple of days anyway.....um, or maybe tonight . Yep probably tonight...

 

[darko999]

I will recommend to let the default page file on your windows partition disk. Disabling page file or moving it is not worth most of the time, people tend to disable it because they believe they have enough free RAM so they do it to get more performance. Problem is, you never know when software could fail, or when a resource hog has started. In these extreme scenarios the page file is quite useful. If you really have a lot of ram just set your page file to the windows minimum allowed values. If there is no specific reason to move your page file from windows partition to another, if there is no critical need for it I will not move it.

 

[AtlBo]

Yes thanks. Hadn't ever tried it before so I guess I learned it doesn't help. I get curious sometimes just to see what it's like to try something, so maybe I will try the remote drive again to see if I can do this without breaking the boot ...

 

[ozone]

I have a lot of RAM and I usually set pagefile to 1 GB, in case something went wrong it will create dumps, also some older apps will crash if there is no pagefile.

You can try to delete pagefile on shutdown https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/314834/how-to-clear-the-windows-paging-file-at-shutdown