Upgraded to new hard drive on Win2k professiona--new drive gets paging file error, tryitoz

  • Thread starter Thread starter Joe Donaldson
  • Start date Start date
J

Joe Donaldson

Have had my PC for awhile now and recently bought a Western Digital
80mb drive (with 8mb buffer) for $100 with $60 rebate coupon. Put on
in my girlfriends Windows ME machine with no problem.

Tried to put in my machine that has Windows 2000 Pro with sp4 patches.
I set up the drive like the current drive with 4 partitions.

When I booted with the new drive had same problem other have seemed to
report after you entered your login (standalone PC) - "Paging file
does not exist or is too small." In the same dialog box it tells you
what to do to change this but you can never get to the desktop not see
any icons. You just keep getting the Windows log in prompt.

I then recopied the old hard disk pagefile to the new drive and tried
to boot again. No luck

Ran Fdisk fix mbr-did not help

Ran Windows 2k repair function from CD-did not help.

Erased page file - did not help

Tried to boot into safe mode - did not help.

Even tried Ghost instead of LifeGuard.

I ended up giving up since after about 4 hours. And the drive
eventually just died-motor stopped spinning. Heard this has happened
to a few of the
wondrous Western Digital 80gb drives with 8mb cache heavily discounted
via rebate of $60 I found at Best Buy.

Not sure if it is a drive problem or one of those great Microsoft
Windows 2000 Professional things when your hardware changes out goes
your registration of the OS. I am thinking the latter.

Spoke to a technician at CompUSA and they have not seen to get by the
problem either without a complete reformat and reinstall of the OS.

I have read a few posts and articles on this but there appears to be
no simple solution to this. But am hoping someone out there has one
without reinstalling the OS.

If there was, I would go buy another drive.

Thanks for any solutions/ideas to this problem


Joe
 
Have you tried an "upgrade-repair". This is >NOT<
the repair option you see first when you boot from
the CD.

Tell it you want to install (not repair) Windows, and after a
couple of prompts it will tell you that there is "already a copy
of Windows...Do you want to repair it?"

This will run the full enhanced-mode setup/upgrade, and recreates
files, registry settings, the hardware tree, etc. You won't lose
existing settings, and will fix most problems like this.
If you've installed service packs and security updates you'll
need to reapply those.


Steve Duff, MCSE
Ergodic Systems, Inc.
 
You have two problems, both of which are easily solved:

- Bad disk: Download the free diagnostic disk checking
program from the WD home site.

- Paging file: Connect some formatted disk as a slave
disk so that Win2000 can set up its paging file on the
drive that is preset. This will give you the opportunity
to modify its location via the Control Panel / System.
 
Thanks not sure it was a drive problem.
I did create a second page file (before I returned the new drive that
went dead)
on the new drive. Then I tried to reboot with just the new drive as
master and no slave--it still had paging error.

Was told that doing a Ghost with a certain setting that gets rid of
some sids and guid's and then Windows creates them. Guess it has to do
with drive references remnants among other things that you mention.



Seems like from what I read on Google, Yahoo, and experts-exchange.com
it seems to be a somewhat pervasive and annoying problem.

I may get a new drive and try again.

Thanks, Joe
 
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