Lock swapfile to removable drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter squelch41
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squelch41

Hi,

I have a laptop with a small, slow internal HDD and a faster, external
firewire HDD.

I want to set my machine to have a small swapfile on the internal drive
and a large swapfile on the external drive but the problem is that the
firewire-ide bridge is tempremental and only works with a bit of
fiddling. If it isnt there when windows boots, windows (understandably)
removes the swap setting on it.

Is it possible to set it so that when the removable drive is active,
windows will untilize a swap file on it, and when it is not there, it
will just use the swap file set on the internall hdd?

Cheers,
squelch41
 
Hi,

I have a laptop with a small, slow internal HDD and a faster, external
firewire HDD.

I want to set my machine to have a small swapfile on the internal drive
and a large swapfile on the external drive but the problem is that the
firewire-ide bridge is tempremental and only works with a bit of
fiddling. If it isnt there when windows boots, windows (understandably)
removes the swap setting on it.

Is it possible to set it so that when the removable drive is active,
windows will untilize a swap file on it, and when it is not there, it
will just use the swap file set on the internall hdd?

Cheers,
squelch41
Click to expand...

Have you considered making the firewire drive bootable ?

I know one person who has done that (with a desktop), but he has
to also use a boot disk in the floppy drive. Actually, he uses
the floppy all the time and select at boot-time whether to boot
from the internal or the external drive.

IIRC, he found out how to do this from something at
http://www.bootdisk.com.
 
It seems to me from probing my long lost memory cells that even if
booted from a network drive or Storage Area Network (SAN) that for best
performance the Windows 2000 pagefile should always be local no matter
what. That to my understanding includes USB and Firewire devices,
although claiming to be faster than internal drives the best place for
the pagefile is on an internal local drive.

John
 
My internal drive is slow - have done benchmark tests and the firewire
drive consistently outperforms it.

I dont want to have the firewire drive bootable as I only really use it
for gaming. I often use my laptop without the external drive.

Thanks
squelch41
 
Well then, you can have a small pagefile on the system partition (aka
memory dump file) and another large pagefile on the firewire drive. The
memory dump file should be at least 2mb, it too will be pagefile.sys.
You will have 2 pagefiles but windows will favour the pagefile on the
least active drive. Best be careful with this, if you make the pagefile
too small on the system partition the pc might not boot, and if Windows
decides to favour the pagefile on the system partition you will get
error messages telling you that you don't have enough virtual memory.
If, as I understand your post, you use the firewire drive for gaming
then that drive will be more active than the system partition and
Windows will want to favour the later for the pagefile.

John
 
The problem is that if the firewire drive isnt working at the time of
boot-up (which due to the crappy chipset, it often isnt) then windows
just removes the setting and when the drive is reconnected, the
pagefile on the external drive wont be recognised
 
Yes indeed, if I recall correctly on older computers the Windows 2000
operating system has to be started before firewire and USB devices can
be recognized correctly so that precludes using these for the pagefile
unless you try to make these bootable like Rob suggested. If you ask me
you probably wouldn't see any noticeable difference from having the
pagefile on the firewire anyway and quite possibly the performance might
even be worse.

John
 
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