Turn off "disk full" warning?

[Jesse]

I moved my system pagefile to a separate partition. The partition is 3 GB.
The pagefile is 3GB minus 5 MB (initial and max sizes are the same).

Now XP is constantly popping up the warning message, letting me know that
the partition is almost out of space -- but it will never fill up, so I
don't need the warning messages.

Can I turn them off for that partition?

Thanks!

--

 

[Anton Pegan]

Hi Jesse,

Take a look at the following article:

Description of the Low Disk Space Notification in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/285107

Regards,

Anton Pegan

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I moved my system pagefile to a separate partition. The partition is
3 GB. The pagefile is 3GB minus 5 MB (initial and max sizes are the
same).
Now XP is constantly popping up the warning message, letting me know
that the partition is almost out of space -- but it will never fill
up, so I don't need the warning messages.

Can I turn them off for that partition?

You've already gotten an answr to your question, but I wanted to make an
additional point:

What you'e done is *not* a good thing to do. The thing that most slows down
use of the page file is moving the drive
heads to and from it. Putting the page file on a second partition on your
only (or main) drive puts it far from the other frequently-used data on the
drive, increases the time it takes to get to and from it, and negatively
impacts performance.

Putting the page file on another *physical* drive, on the other hand,
normally increases performance. A good rule of thumb is that the page file
should be on the most-used partition of the least-used physical drive. For
almost everyone, that's C:

However, note that most people these days have enough RAM so that page file
use is minimal. If you fall into that category (for most people, 512MB or
more) it hardly makes any difference where the page file is located.

 

[Shenan Stanley]

I moved my system pagefile to a separate partition. The partition
is 3 GB. The pagefile is 3GB minus 5 MB (initial and max sizes are
the same).
Now XP is constantly popping up the warning message, letting me
know that the partition is almost out of space -- but it will never
fill up, so I don't need the warning messages.

Can I turn them off for that partition?

Unless that "partition" is on another physical drive (other than the one
your system boot partition is on) --> you've accomplished exactly zip, nada,
nothing. No matter how many partitions you have on your hard disk drive -
it's the same heads in the drive itself reading the data, same arm moving it
back and forth over the disk going through the same cabling as all the rest
of the data. So, unless you moved the pagefile to another drive, all you
accomplished was a better looking bookshelf with one more book. It still
holds the same amount of stuff and you still have to reach to the same shelf
to get that stuff - but at least you added one more shade of binder. ;-)

 

[Jesse]

Ken (and Shenan),

Thanks for the advice. I guess I'll move the pagefile back! The reason I
moved it in the first place was so that I could extend my primary partition.
(Can't extend a partition with a pagefile.) Now that that's done, there's no
real need for it to be anywhere else.

Question: I figured that since it's in its own partition, and starts out at
its max size, it won't be fragmented, which seems like it would help
performance. Is that not accurate?

Thanks again,

Jesse

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Ken (and Shenan),

Thanks for the advice. I guess I'll move the pagefile back! The
reason I moved it in the first place was so that I could extend my
primary partition. (Can't extend a partition with a pagefile.) Now
that that's done, there's no real need for it to be anywhere else.

Question: I figured that since it's in its own partition, and starts
out at its max size, it won't be fragmented, which seems like it
would help performance. Is that not accurate?

No, fragmentation isn't an issue with the pagefile, since access to it is
essentially random anyway.

For more information, read this article by the late MVP, Alex Nichol:
"Virtual Memory in Windows
XP" at http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[Jesse]

Thanks, Ken. I see that diskpart.exe won't allow me to extend my primary
partition into the unused space on my new disk. Is there a way to do this
without buying new software?

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Thanks, Ken. I see that diskpart.exe won't allow me to extend my
primary partition into the unused space on my new disk. Is there a
way to do this without buying new software?

You're welcome. Glad to help.

Do you have such unused, unpartitioned space? It's very unusual to have any?

 

[Jesse]

Yeah, I do. I just replaced a 40GB drive with an 80. I used Ghost to copy
everything from the old drive to the new -- but it recreated the 40GB
partition on the new drive, leaving me with 40 GB of unused, unpartitioned
space. I can partition it and mount it, but since I don't really need two
partitions, I'd rather just extend the original partition.

(Apparently, I can't create a dynamic partition on my laptop. Not sure why
not, but the option's not available in the Disk Management control panel.)

 

[Shenan Stanley]

Yeah, I do. I just replaced a 40GB drive with an 80. I used Ghost
to copy everything from the old drive to the new -- but it
recreated the 40GB partition on the new drive, leaving me with 40
GB of unused, unpartitioned space. I can partition it and mount it,
but since I don't really need two partitions, I'd rather just
extend the original partition.
(Apparently, I can't create a dynamic partition on my laptop. Not
sure why not, but the option's not available in the Disk Management
control panel.)

If you have not done much - ghost has a switch to expand the resultant
application to the full size of the target disk.
You could re-apply the image.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Yeah, I do. I just replaced a 40GB drive with an 80. I used Ghost to
copy everything from the old drive to the new -- but it recreated the
40GB partition on the new drive, leaving me with 40 GB of unused,
unpartitioned space. I can partition it and mount it, but since I
don't really need two partitions, I'd rather just extend the original
partition.
(Apparently, I can't create a dynamic partition on my laptop. Not
sure why not, but the option's not available in the Disk Management
control panel.)

I know next to nothing about dynamic partitions, but for regular partitions,
if you have unpartitioned space, you can create more partitions there, but
you can't extend existing ones. To do that, you need third-party software.