Your System Has No Paging File, or the Paging File Is Too Small

[mene]

Afternoon,
I am receiving an error message when I turn this workstation on and
attempt to login. I cannot proceed from this point as it dumps back to the
login screen. It reads:

Your System Has No Paging File, or the Paging File Is Too Small

I had a failing hard drive, I put it in this system to retrieve the files
and forced a chkdsk on boot. Somehow the OS was switched to drive E: after
that (and chkdsk checked C: even though I said E. I removed the failing
hard drive after that boot and restarted, now the system gives me the above
error message when logging in.

-KB articles provide no assistance because when that error appears I cannot
login.
-I do not have Intel application accelerator
-I attempted to edit the registry offline to view what the pagefile.sys
settings were and in all HKLM\ControlSet00*\Session Manager\Memory
Management\PagingFiles it reads c:\pagefile.sys and the right sizes
-Created a blank pagefile.sys text file in recovery console, set the file
attributes, it deletes itself
-I would put the failing drive back in, it will login. Unfortunately the
drive has now completely died.
-Using another NTFS drive does not permit the system to boot
-Running chkdsk in recovery console does nothing

I was looking for HKLM\CurrentControlSet, but I assume that is not present
until the system starts. Is there somewhere else I can look? There is no
pagefile.sys present on the drive at this time.

Please help, reinstalling feels like defeat.

TIA
mene

 

[Guest]

when you set the attributes to hidden the file should disappear. Its not
gone. It is hidden. attrib pagefile.sys should reveal the file as being
there.

You can do a repair not new install. This will get your pagefile back and
keep the present configuration. You will need to reapply the latest service
pack.

 

[mene]

haha, that is too funny. I set +h on the file and wondered what happened to
it after restart... i = smrt.

Thank you, I will try a repair. I really wanted to know how to manually do
this because "repair" is just so vague and time consuming. Do you know what
is done by the repair procedures to recreate the pagefile?

Thank you,
mene

 

[Guest]

mene

recently I experienced the same or very similar error sequences and perhaps
this solution will help you.

The solution was two fold: First make sure that you have the active drive
set to the correct partition on your boot drive. Second you will probably
want to rewrite the MBR. The error message does not indicate the actual
problem.

These two suggestions came from Symantek and worked fine. You can use your
boot cd to get into a recovery console mode. From there select the correct
location for your OS (if it asks). At the prompt type help. Then execute
Fixboot and next fixmbr.

These same actions can be done from a W98 bootable disk with Fdisk. There
1) execute Fdisk ...set active partition .. select the correct partition and
2) execute "fdsisk /mbr"
That should allow you to boot past that error. Afterwards look around your
different partitions for any "extra" pagefile files that are not listed in
the virtual memory settings. And note this presumes that you do have better
than 550Mb free space on your boot partition. Otherwise you will get a new
error and you will need to specify a beter location for the actual page file
(Virtual Memory settigns)

Hope this helps some.
Oldtimer

 

[mene]

That did it!

Thank you so much!

 

[Guest]

Mene,

Glad that worked out for you. Happy to help.

Oldtimer

 

[Guest]

What is the MBR?