Where in Registry to disable pagefile.sys ?

[bizzybody]

I had XP on a 32gig partition (with the rest of the drive as a 117 gig partition) and a 74 gig drive as primary slave.

I used Partition Magic 8 to copy C: to the 74gig and resize it to fill the drive. Upon rebooting, it asked which windows install to boot and would boot either one.

Next try, swap the drives' cable positions and master/slave settings- it SHOULD see the exact copy of the XP install on primary master and boot from it, right? No! It goes direct to partition 0 of the slave drive and boots right into XP without asking which install to boot. I made certain that the BIOS boot order is set to boot the 74gig drive 0 first.

Back to Partition Magic. I set this sequence of actions.

1. Delete partition on primary master.

2. Copy partition 0 from primary slave to primary master.

3. Resize copied partition to fill the drive.

4. Hide partition 0 on primary slave.

It does all that and now booting hangs at the screen with the small Windows XP logo and the mouse pointer, which can move.

I suspect there's something boogerd with the swap file. I have ERD Commander 2005, which has a registry editor. Where in the registry can I change whatever gets changed when using the normal virtual memory settings from within Windows to disable the swap file? I'm hoping that it will then boot and I can delete pagefile.sys, re-enable the swap file the normal way then reboot and Windows will create a new pagefile.sys

I'd like to avoid having to reinstall Windows, even though it's a fairly fresh install without much other stuff on it yet. (Might be an opportunity to finally try out the 64bit version on the AMD chip.)

[stans4]

I had XP on a 32gig partition (with the rest of the drive as a 117 gig partition) and a 74 gig drive as primary slave.

I used Partition Magic 8 to copy C: to the 74gig and resize it to fill the drive. Upon rebooting, it asked which windows install to boot and would boot either one.

Next try, swap the drives' cable positions and master/slave settings- it SHOULD see the exact copy of the XP install on primary master and boot from it, right? No! It goes direct to partition 0 of the slave drive and boots right into XP without asking which install to boot. I made certain that the BIOS boot order is set to boot the 74gig drive 0 first.

Back to Partition Magic. I set this sequence of actions.

1. Delete partition on primary master.

2. Copy partition 0 from primary slave to primary master.

3. Resize copied partition to fill the drive.

4. Hide partition 0 on primary slave.

It does all that and now booting hangs at the screen with the small Windows XP logo and the mouse pointer, which can move.

I suspect there's something boogerd with the swap file. I have ERD Commander 2005, which has a registry editor. Where in the registry can I change whatever gets changed when using the normal virtual memory settings from within Windows to disable the swap file? I'm hoping that it will then boot and I can delete pagefile.sys, re-enable the swap file the normal way then reboot and Windows will create a new pagefile.sys

I'd like to avoid having to reinstall Windows, even though it's a fairly fresh install without much other stuff on it yet. (Might be an opportunity to finally try out the 64bit version on the AMD chip.)

You copied the partition right? Not the whole drive? Couple of things to check. See that you've got a boot sector on your new drive. See that the partition you've got is set active, this sounds like it isn't. Check to see that BOOT.INI on your new drive reflects your new drive lineup, it doesn't know from drive letters, only physical locations at rollcall. The utility I use, DFSee, boots from its own CD so there's no problems with active files when doing the cloning.

I've done this a number of times, I clone the whole drive, not just the partition, to the newer, larger one. After that I pull the original drive out, make whatever jumper changes are needed and slide the new one in in place of the old one. Only AFTER it's checked out do I resize the partition(s).

Stan

[severach]

There isn't a problem with your swap file though that's the error you might see. When you plugged the drive in Windows recorded the drive letter and it's trying to switch over to that drive letter during boot.

Before you do the copy you need to go into the registry and delete all the \?? and \DosDevices values. If you don't want to redo the copy, insert the other drive, use RegEdit Load Hive to attach SYSTEM, and hunt through for that key and delete the values, then Unload the hive.

If your boot drive isn't C: then none of this will work for you.

[jaclaz]

...or maybe simply change the drive signature with mbrfix:

http://www.sysint.no/Nedlasting/MbrFix.htm

http://www.sysint.no/Nedlasting/MbrFix.zip

http://home.graffiti.net/jaclaz:graffiti.net/index.html

or with a disk editor.

Reference:

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm#DC

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/W...br.htm#DiskSigs

jaclaz

[bizzybody]

It boots from the drive I copied the partition to, then expanded it to fill the whole drive. That drive is physically connected as Primary Master.

The problem is AFTER BOOTING, during Windows startup. It gets to the screen right before the login prompt would appear (if I didn't have it set to automatic login) and it stops dead.

It is NOT FROZEN because the mouse pointer still can be moved. Inserting a CD makes a little CD icon appear on the pointer.

The first time I copied the partition from the Primary Master drive (before swapping the drives physically) to the Primary Slave drive, I got a boot menu with a choice of which one to boot from and it would boot and launch Windows just fine. Somehow the boot.ini on the original Primary Master drive got changed to include the two choices. the boot.ini on the other drive was NOT CHANGED from the original.

When I swapped the drives, it'd just boot to the original Windows install- now on the Primary Slave drive. How it managed that when boot.ini on the Master drive had no pointer to the second drive, I have no idea! It continued to boot to the slave drive even after I edited the boot.ini on it to not have a pointer to the slave drive.

With it still booting to the slave drive, I deleted the partition on the master drive and the rest as listed above.

Before I did that I tried disconnecting the slave drive so it could not 'jump' to the wrong drive and got exactly the same situation it's in now.

I wonder if anything useful would show up in the boot log? I should be able to get to that with ERD Commander.

It's bugging me that for some reason Partition Magic hasn't done something right. It's ALWAYS worked perfectly before, when I've done this on someone else's PC! (Version 7 didn't because it didn't copy the volume ID and serial number, which would cause 2000 and XP to do the endless boot-loop.) I've even copied an XP Pro install from a drive with only one primary partition to a Dell B110's middle partition, nuking XP Home, and all I had to do to make it work was edit boot.ini to point to partition 2.

[bizzybody]

I figured it out. I forgot that installing Drive Mapper is something one does not do with PM 8.0, especially NOT when copying the partition Windows 2000 or XP is installed on. It mucks things up without bothering to ask if it's OK to muck them up.

I could've unhid the original partition, swapped the drives back, uninstalled then reinstalled PM WITHOUT Drive Mapper, then swapped the drives again and redid the copy etc...

but I decided heck with it and did a fresh wipe and clean install on the 74 gig drive.

I've seen some posts about Norton Partition Magic 8.05. Where/how did people get hold of that?! I haven't been able to find any updates to 8.0 anywhere.