Solved Can Windows boot up and recover if Pagefile.sys is missing ?

[alan10]

I understand that Windows is better if Pagefile.sys is held on a separate Drive.
I intend to implement this on my desktop which has C:\ on a Primary MBR HDD,
and an available internal Secondary GPT BASIC HDD.

What happens if the Secondary HDD is damaged or missing when Windows attempts to Boot Up ?
Does it happily run and create a new Pagefile.sys on Drive C:\ when all RAM is used,
or does it BSOD repeatedly ?

This is extremely relevant if the secondary data HDD should go missing

I have an immediate interest because I use Macrium to make image backups,
and it is a waste of time backing up Pagefile.sys because yesterday's data is useless.
However if Macrium gives me a VHD conversion from its backup,
I can plug that into VirtualBox as a Virtual HDD and then compare operation with last month's virtual system with today's Live system.
I now need to know if the Pagefile.sys partition needs to be included in the image backup as part of the VHD for Virtual use.

Regards
Alan

 

[logicearth]

The pagefile is recreated if its missing. If the drive is not present then it is ignored entirely.

 

[alan10]

Thank you.
Implementing system change now

Regards
Alan

 

[FliGi7]

Where are you getting the idea Windows is "better" with the pagefile on another hard drive?

 

[DeaconFrost]

Where are you getting the idea Windows is "better" with the pagefile on another hard drive?

That was an old performance "tweak" that applied way back in XP and pre-XP days. You'd put your pagefile on a separate physical disk as your OS. It hasn't been relevant in years, though, since it doesn't yield any difference anymore.

 

[alan10]

Where are you getting the idea Windows is "better" with the pagefile on another hard drive?

1.
Second hand theory from the Internet.
If software residing in primary HDD chooses to use the pagefile residing in Secondary HDD,
the Primary HDD does not have to seek the track for the Pagefile,
and then have to seek the track for the next bit of code it should execute,
instead the Secondary HDD will seek for the pagefile once and possible stay in situ ready for the next Pagefile transfer.
Sometimes I click and nothing happens for a few seconds.
I am guessing that 4 GB is barely sufficient for Windows 7 Ultimate x64 plus all the applications,
and improving Pagefile access may sweeten life till Christmas when I hope for more RAM.

2.
First hand Practical Experience.
An unannounced lying Windows Security Patch put a time bomb on my new system before I mastered the navigation to put updates under my control (I was then only familiar with XP)
Windows survived the planting of a time bomb and I thought all was well.
I edited some user documents and added and re-positioned many useful shortcuts to a partition with many valuable portable applications.
At the end of the day I shut down.
Next morning I powered up and the time bomb detonated.
The system was useless and every reboot was a repeated disaster.

I put in the Macrium Rescue Boot CD and BEFORE restoring my system I used that to create a backup image of the disaster,
after which I successfully restored the image made immediately before that unannounced lying Windows Security Patch.
After achieving pre-disaster normality I used Macrium to mount the post-disaster image,
and using BestSync to compare real normality with mounted disaster I instantly restored all my edited documents and desktop shortcuts.
Then I made another backup.

After a cooling off time-out I reviewed what happened.
Amongst my findings were that the Rescue Boot CD created a significantly larger image backup the the backups made under Live Windows.
I mounted the backups and found no significant difference between the contents,
until I took a hex editor to Pagefile.sys and Hiberfil.sys.
Under Live Windows Macrium uses the default VSS when available,
and that refrains from snapshots of those two *.sys so the backup holds null content place-holders of the correct size.
When VSS is broken (not uncommon)
or under the Boot WinPE environment of the Macrium Rescue,
a different system is applied that captures every sector that is in use,
including these two *.sys files.

These two files are an inefficient waste of user time and image archive space when VSS is not available,
and I suspect Macrium is not the only product that uses VSS when available and is adversely impacted when not available.

On top of which I decided that 25 GB should be enough for C:\,
and I found I was using 16 GB with 9 GB of free space.
9 GB in use and 16 GB free space feels much better with those two *.sys out of the way.

Incidentally one day I was about to shutdown but noticed Explorer had a great big RED bar showing a corrupt unusable partition.
I found it was my C:\ that was down to 200 MB of free space.
I feared that might be inadequate for a reboot the following day,
so I used TreeSize to locate the intruder and found and deleted jumbo files in %TEMP%
It turned out that when I did a copy/paste from a VMWare virtual partition to one of my secondary drive partitions, VMWare choose to make the transfer via my %TEMP% folder.
I am now using Oracle VirtualBox.

 

[alan10]

Where are you getting the idea Windows is "better" with the pagefile on another hard drive?

That was an old performance "tweak" that applied way back in XP and pre-XP days. You'd put your pagefile on a separate physical disk as your OS. It hasn't been relevant in years, though, since it doesn't yield any difference anymore.

Is there no difference now because windows hold the Pagefile in a RAM cache

What has changed since XP (which I was using until a few months ago).

Regards
Alan

 

[FliGi7]

That all sounds theoretical and measurable only by benchmark utilities. Unless you have a rather old machine with very little memory or are using an SSD as the OS drive, I wouldn't go through all of this hassle to move the pagefile for a theoretical gain.

4GB is more than plenty for Win 7. Your issue with clicking and nothing happening more than likely has nothing to do with the pagefile and more to do with waiting on a busy or rogue process.

 

[DeaconFrost]

What has changed since XP (which I was using until a few months ago).

XP hasn't been the primary OS in 5-6 years, and is well over a decade old. Computer hardware is what has changed drastically. The pagefile is still store on a disk, but HDDs are worlds faster than they were when this tweak was applicable. It wasn't necessary, even before SDDs become so common. In addition to all of this, Windows 7 does a much better job of using the memory in a system, continuing on with the trend that Vista started.

Besides, the best way to tweak Windows 7 has always been...leave it alone.

 

[Corazon]

Might I add that Macrium Reflect, and for that matter any modern backup/imaging software out there, does not back up the pagefile or the hibernation file (if one is present). It's smart enough to ignore these files during backup.

When such a backup is restored, I suspect that either an empty pagefile.sys is recreated on the restored partition or it's simply not there, in which case Windows would recreate it on its own on the next restart anyway.

The only exception of course applies if you're making a full clone image including all sectors.

Point being: moving your pagefile.sys to another drive just to avoid having it backed up with the system is completely unnecessary.

 

[alan10]

Might I add that Macrium Reflect, and for that matter any modern backup/imaging software out there, does not back up the pagefile or the hibernation file (if one is present). It's smart enough to ignore these files during backup.

I disagree.

Macrium Reflect ETC does NOT ignore these files.
It is VSS which refrains from including them in its snapshot.

If VSS is broken, and when there is no VSS under a Boot CD environment,
then Macrium uses its own drivers to capture all used sectors without distinction of what files they are in.

I believe alternative imaging software similarly uses VSS to expedite image creation,
and given no VSS the result is again either no distinction or a total fail because there is no "fall-back" position with alternative drivers.

Regards
Alan

 

[alan10]

XP hasn't been the primary OS in 5-6 years, and is well over a decade old. Computer hardware is what has changed drastically. The pagefile is still store on a disk, but HDDs are worlds faster than they were when this tweak was applicable.

How much faster in average access time, rotational delay, and track seek time, in the last few years ?

In addition to all of this, Windows 7 does a much better job of using the memory in a system, continuing on with the trend that Vista started.

I will accept your judgement on that,
but is it relevant when Firefox has the same massive memory leaks on Windows 7 as it does on Windows XP

And what happens if I have a few applications using much of my free RAM and then some web-site causes Firefox to grab all spare memory and then some on top.

Regards
Alan

 

[flemur13013]

What happens if the Secondary HDD is damaged or missing when Windows attempts to Boot Up ?

Mostly nothing, but I had a system crash from some software (UltimateDefrag?) that assumed C:\ would have a pagefile. You can put the pagefile on more than one partition, so perhaps make a small one (20M or whatever) on C:, and the rest somewhere else.

Macrium Reflect ETC does NOT ignore these files.
It is VSS which refrains from including them in its snapshot.

ViceVersa Pro (which I think is far better than Macrium) backs-up pagefile.sys using VSS unless you tell it not to.

 

[Corazon]

Might I add that Macrium Reflect, and for that matter any modern backup/imaging software out there, does not back up the pagefile or the hibernation file (if one is present). It's smart enough to ignore these files during backup.

I disagree.

Macrium Reflect ETC does NOT ignore these files.
It is VSS which refrains from including them in its snapshot.

Sorry, but I disagree too.

I used Macrium Reflect for backing up my Windows XP system (before I wiped it and went to 7). That XP system had a completely broken VSS, so Macrium used its own driver to make a shadow copy of the running system. Logically, it would have to ignore pagefile.sys on its own if it has no VSS to rely on for doing that, right?

As for backing up from within the rescue environment, you don't have to do a full clone image...my WinPE rescue disc still offers the "intelligent copy" option just like Reflect under Windows does. Bigger image files are a natural consequence of using the clone mode instead, and that isn't directly related to the mere existence of pagefile.sys...

 

[alan10]

I used Macrium Reflect for backing up my Windows XP system (before I wiped it and went to 7). That XP system had a completely broken VSS, so Macrium used its own driver to make a shadow copy of the running system.

Yes - that is what I already said.

Logically, it would have to ignore pagefile.sys on its own if it has no VSS to rely on for doing that, right?

Actually an illogical assumption for which you give no basis.

I am quite confident that if you move your pagefile and Hiberfil to a different place so they are not part of the image, you will find you get smaller AND FASTER images.
Macrium drivers do NOT exclude P* and H*

Macrium users have asked for the ability to exclude things such as System Volume Information from an image and that was not possible for v4.2, and I have not seen any claim that there is any change with v5.
I understand that the non-VSS drivers are driven by Macrium to image everything, and that Macrium takes no notice of which sectors belong to what files, only whether those sectors are within a non-deleted file.

As for backing up from within the rescue environment, you don't have to do a full clone image...my WinPE rescue disc still offers the "intelligent copy" option just like Reflect under Windows does. Bigger image files are a natural consequence of using the clone mode instead, and that isn't directly related to the mere existence of pagefile.sys...

You are so horribly wrong due to another false assumption.
I ALWAYS use the "intelligent copy" option under Windows and also under WinPE rescue disc. I did not clone it.

A FULL "intelligent copy" of 16.1 GB used space including 4 GB Pagefile and 3 GB Hiberfil created :-
Under Live Windows a 5.4 GB image;
Under Boot WinPE about 5.6 GB image.
My first thought was a different degree of compression, but I ran WinPE again and the same setting was used.
Then I thought VSS and so I used a binary comparison tool to compare various images of Pagefile with each other, and various images of Hiberfil.
All the images captured under Live Windows had identical contents P* vs P* and H* vs H*, but when I compared the images captured under WinPE there were differences.

That confirmed to me that the Macrium Drivers under WinPE had NOT excluded H* and P* from the image. I also deduced that there was not a lot of information within H* and P* hence very high compression - 7 GB of data adds 0.2 GB to the image. I also realised that the much longer image creation time was not that WinPE is much slower, but that Macrium had to read and compress 16 GB of used space instead of the 9 GB of useful used space.

Regards
Alan

 

[rraod]

It is always safer to leave the pagefile.sys in the C: where the OS is placed, rather than tweaking it to move to another HDD or partition.

This will make sure that a pagefile is always available to the OS when it needs...

I usually make the initial pagefile size to be 1.5 times of memory size and the maximum pagefile size to be 2 times of memory size.

 

[FliGi7]

I think the bottom line is there is really a near-zero advantage of moving the pagefile off the main drive unless it's to a faster drive or your main drive is an SSD and you're trying to maximize its life (and even that is still debates as to whether or not the pagefile actually makes any sort of negative impact on an SSD's life). As you can see, by doing so, you get yourself into all other sorts of issues that really aren't necessary and just extra headache.

 

[Corazon]

alan10: your report of live backups vs. WinPE backups actually supports the fact that at least under Windows, Macrium does not back up pagefile.sys with intelligent copy. It only keeps a placeholder in the image. That's why you would find no difference in pagefile.sys between images.

Macrium themselves state that Reflect skips the pagefile.sys when using intelligent copy. I really don't think they're just lying about that, do you?

 

[alan10]

alan10: your report of live backups vs. WinPE backups actually supports the fact that at least under Windows, Macrium does not back up pagefile.sys with intelligent copy. It only keeps a placeholder in the image. That's why you would find no difference in pagefile.sys between images.

Absolutely agree.
Our only difference is that you ascribe this to their being smart,
whilst I ascribe it to their not being able to due to VSS not including it in the snapshot.

Macrium themselves state that Reflect skips the pagefile.sys when using intelligent copy. I really don't think they're just lying about that, do you?

Neither they nor you are lying.
I NEVER said that they do NOT skip pagefile under Windows.
I only said they do NOT skip pagefile under under WinPE.

There is no contention here,
just different ways of looking at and expressing the same thing.

Regards
Alan

 

[Corazon]

alan10: then it seems we agree after all. I might have misunderstood what you were saying in the beginning - if so, I apologize. We're good.