Additional Pagefile Created Setting Up Memory Dump

ID: Q141468

The information in this article applies to:

SUMMARY

When you setup your system up for recovery in the event a Stop error occurs a second pagefile may be created. If your pagefile is not located on the %SYSTEMROOT% partition you will receive the following message:

In order to create a debugging information file, the initial pagefile size on volume <drive letter> must be at least <amount of disk space> megabytes. The initial pagefile size will be changed now.

The amount of disk space requested will be approximately equal to the amount of physical memory you have on the system plus 1MB.

If there is not enough disk space available on the %SYSTEMROOT% partition you will receive the following message:
There is not enough free space on the boot drive to enable crash recovery. At least <amount of disk space> megabytes of free space on drive <drive letter> are needed. Please free up some disk space and try again.


MORE INFORMATION

When the pagefile is not initially located on the %SYSTEMROOT% partition, a pagefile is created on the %SYSTEMROOT% to reserve adequate disk space for the dump file if a Stop error occurs. This is done to ensure the creation of the dump file.

This also eliminates the problem of the Memory.dmp file not being created if the paging file is not located on the %SYSTEMROOT% directory as noted in the following knowledge base article:

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

ARTICLE-ID: Q130536
TITLE : Windows NT Does Not Save Memory Dump File After A Crash


Although you can change the path for the location of the dump file using Control Panel, Windows NT always writes the debugging information to the pagefile on the %SYSTEMROOT% partition first, and then moves the dump file to the path specified. 


Keywords          : ntconfig 
Version           : WinNT:3.51,4.0
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbinfo

Last Reviewed: February 2, 1999