Mixed SCSI, IDE -- system partition and page file(s)

[saltbeet]

I'm running Vista on a machine with one IDE drive and multiple SCSI
drives. I wanted the OS on a SCSI drive, but Setup kept insisting on
putting Vista on the IDE drive. I got around that by disconnecting
the IDE drive before trying again. That worked: Vista is now on one
of the SCSI drives. But I have two problems:

(1) Somehow or other, the (one and only) partition on one of the
other SCSI drives is now a system partition. (I remember this as
happening well after things were up and running, but this was some
time ago and my memory could be playing tricks on me.) I'm not
allowed to change that disk's drive letter because of this.

Is there any way of changing this? Perhaps more important, I'm going
to be rebuilding the machine and reinstalling Vista shortly, and how
can I prevent this from happening again?

(2) I put the page file on a separate SCSI drive. Vista complained
about that, so I added a tiny, token 200 MB page file to the Windows
disk to shut it up. But now I get this, sometimes, in Event Viewer:

"Event 49, volmgr
Configuring the Page file for crash dump failed. Make sure there is a
page file on the boot partition and that is large enough to contain
all physical memory."

Bad grammar aside, it's basically insisting that I put most (if not
all) of my page file on the Windows drive. I would prefer not to.
Any ideas?

 

[Andy]

I'm running Vista on a machine with one IDE drive and multiple SCSI
drives. I wanted the OS on a SCSI drive, but Setup kept insisting on
putting Vista on the IDE drive. I got around that by disconnecting
the IDE drive before trying again. That worked: Vista is now on one
of the SCSI drives. But I have two problems:

(1) Somehow or other, the (one and only) partition on one of the
other SCSI drives is now a system partition. (I remember this as
happening well after things were up and running, but this was some
time ago and my memory could be playing tricks on me.) I'm not
allowed to change that disk's drive letter because of this.

Is there any way of changing this? Perhaps more important, I'm going
to be rebuilding the machine and reinstalling Vista shortly, and how
can I prevent this from happening again?

You don't say what motherboard you have, but if its bios enumerates
the hard disks correctly, moving the drive that you want to boot from
to the top of the list in bios setup setting Hard Disk Drives or Hard
Disk Boot Priority should cause Windows setup to place the boot files
on that disk.

 

[Guest]

He's right. You're better off using your boot drive, and only your boot
drive for the install, then add storage later. Windows can be finnicky about
which drive it finds first, and wil write system info on that drive.

As far as your page file, that makes sense. Do you have more than 200Mb of
RAM? If you do, how do you expect that to dump to a 200Mb page file? I
think Windows prefers 1500mb. You can still use a page file on another
volume as well, it is my understanding Windows will use whichever it feels
performs better.

 

[saltbeet]

He's right. You're better off using your boot drive, and only your boot
drive for the install, then add storage later. Windows can be finnicky about
which drive it finds first, and wil write system info on that drive.

Good idea.

As far as your page file, that makes sense. Do you have more than 200Mb of
RAM?

4 Gb.

If you do, how do you expect that to dump to a 200Mb page file?

I don't. I expect it to dump to the other page file. I have two
identical SCSI drives involved here: the Windows drive and what I'll
call the Page drive. On the Windows drive I have the 200 Mb page file
that Vista insists on. And on the Page drive I have a 5Gb page file.
It seems to me that it makes sense to keep paging duties and other OS
duties on separate drives, so that the heads for one function don't
have to scoot to another area of the disk to take care of something
for the other function, then scoot back to the first area to continue
what they were doing when interrupted. But Vista doesn't seem to want
me to use this strategy, and I'm not sure why.