Re: Fixing pagefile.sys from recovery console???

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surface9 wrote:

These 8 steps are pretty much what I am doing except a) disk3 is
connected as a USB during the copy command, and b) I use xcopy instead
of robocopy. I have never heard of robocopy but I will go now and see
what I can find out about it. I am not trying to boot to a USB - I do
just what those 8 steps say and then I try to boot from my backup
(disk3), after the xcopy completes, but mounting it as the primary
with no other disks present. It says it is not-bootable, but, I then
boot to my Win2k CD and run FIXBOOT from the repair console, and then
boot to Disk3 again and it goes OK, until it is ready to bring up the
desktop - then it goes into the infinite loop about the pagefile.sys
being too small or not present - I check this Disk3 by booting to a
DOS disk and looking to see that there is infact a pagefile.sys file
and it is the exact same size as the original one (Disk2 from the 8
steps above). If robocopy works better then xcopy, then that will
solve my problem, but, I am still wondering why the xcopy method works
for XP and not for Win2k.

Someone here might correct me on this but I seem to recall that, if the pagefile is truly missing (i.e. doesn't exist) at boot time, Win2K recreates it and goes on its merry way. In which case, the solution to your problem would seem to be to not include the pagefile in your backup/restore at all.

I don't know why this is happening although I suspect it may have to do with the fact that the pagefile is a "special" file that Windows treats differently from other files, probably accessing it directly rather than through the regular filesystem (for speed) and it may need to know exactly where it is on the drive/partition. (None of the defrag programs that I have seen will move the swap file on the drive although they will defrag it internally at boot time). If that is so, then backup/restore using XCopy could restore the swap file to a different disk location and Windows may well complain.

As for it working with XP - well, we know from recent threads here that XP pagefile handling differs from Win2K - certainly in the sense that XP will work with no pagefile at whereas Win2K demands at least a minimal pagefile. Perhaps there are other differences that make XP more "robust" in this respect.

Frankly, I think your backup method is .... well, masochistic :-) And I think if you tried a backup application such as Ghost or Acronis in combination with a (single) USB drive, you'd look back and agree. There is also a backup application - Rebit - which I'm trying out right now. It runs in the background, backs up to a USB drive and keeps multiple versions of modified files so you have a choice of files to restore. The penalty for running in the background doesn't seem (so far) to be severe. The USB backup drive is also plug-and-play on any machine (if you have multiple licences). The only downside I've found is that it won't let you backup individual partitions .... at least not on the boot drive. It's the whole drive or nothing.

Whatever suits you though. Another thing you could consider, if you continue with the XCopy/many-drive/fixboot method :-) is to move the pagefile to the second hard drive if you have one. Then it doesn't enter into the scheme at all when you are backing up the boot drive.
.

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