Windows keeps using a pagefile on a non-OS drive

[Maverick6969]

For the life of me, I cannot understand why Windows 7 keeps using a paging file on a non-OS hard drive.

I recently did a clean installation of Win7. Everything has been going smoothly up until recently I had a problem with a hard drive going south on me. Or so I thought. Turns out the HDD is still good.

Win7 Pro 64-bit
4 GB - DDR2 RAM
Q6700 quad core.
HDD 1 - dedicated for the OS.
HDD 2 - images/backups
HDD 3 - random stuff
HDD 4 - personal data

A few days ago, Windows 7 sort of burped on me while I was surfing and downloading some files concurrently onto HDD #4 (storage hdd). I was in the midst of composing a message on a forum, all of a sudden everything froze up - system became completely unresponsive for several seconds. Even though I did Ctrl_Alt_del (task manager), it took forever to come up. (Probably took a full minute).

At this point, Windows 7 gave me a pop up message saying Windows lost the display driver but had recovered it. (I'm paraphrasing here). Task manager didn't show anything abnormal.

I closed all my applications and rebooted the system. Or atleast I tried to. Windows failed to boot. Got all the way to the Windows splash screen and kept stalling. Tried safe mode as well. I also tried to restore an image I made recently with Acronis True Image. Again - failed to boot. At this point I was thinking I was hosed and would have to do another clean install.

I unplugged/disconnected everything except for my C: OS drive. Finally got Windows 7 to boot up normally. I reconnected each of the other 3 HDDs one-by-one and when I got to HDD #3, Windows again failed to boot. I pulled that hard drive from the system and hooked it up to a USB adapter - just like this one here. Partition table including all the data were fine - I was able to access & open any of the files. I have left this hard drive out of the system and it will remain unconnected until I can buy an external enclosure.

After I got the system to boot normally, I opened up system event viewer hoping it would yield some clues as to what the fudge was going on.....Lo & behold, there are literally over a hundred yellow exclamation marks. (see 1st screenshot). Vast majority of them refer to a "page fault" operation error on "Harddisk5". Well "Harddisk5" according to Event Viewer is not the same as what it is currently. The numeration has changed because I've disconnected that problematic drive from my system. Currently "Harddisk5" is now my EXTERNAL western dig. hard drive hooked up via a firewire cable.

So I made sure that paging was turned off for all hard drives except for C: OS drive. As for the OS hard drive, I have always been taught that Windows manages the page file just fine on it's own. As for HDD that contain data only, I'm still unclear why Windows 7 keeps conducting paging operations. In fact, I looked on each of the hard drives in my system and there is NO FILE even remotely close to "pagefile.sys" except for C: of course.

Several days went by, I thought everything was fine. Just yesterday I opened up the Event Viewer and more errors related to paging file. As you can see from the following screenshot, it says paging file error on hard disk 5 again! _UGH_

Why in the world is Windows 7 attempting to conduct paging operations??

Second problem is that Event viewer reports several errors related to my C drive.

"The Shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because the shadow copy storage could not grow due to a user imposed limit." I have no idea how to fix this. See my 3rd screenshot.

Any help would be greatly appreciated & sorry once again for the long post.

 

[Maverick6969]

I have finally figured out the answer to the 2nd problem (shadow copy volume) by reading this thread which solved my problem. Now, only the 1st question remains.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Windows uses paged virtual memory. "Paging error on drive X" does NOT mean that windows has put a paging file on that drive. Rather, it means that some application opened a memory-mapped file off of that drive, and windows had errors reading the file.

 

[Maverick6969]

Windows uses paged virtual memory.

Virtual memory ~ term from Win9.x days
Paged memory ~ from from NT days.

paged virtual memory... isn't that sort of redundant? I'm not being sarcastic. Seriously, what is that? Same thing as saying paged memory isn't it?

Rather, it means that some application opened a memory-mapped file off of that drive, and windows had errors reading the file.

Alright. So if it's not the OS that's causing the error, then is there a way of finding out what application is causing this? Seriously, it's bugging the crap out of me here. This is the 2nd time that (2 different hdds) that a hard drive has dropped out all of a sudden due to this paging error. Before upgrading to Win7, I rarely ever had this problem. I've already run hardware test on the hard drives & mechanically they seem to be fine.

And what the heck happened to all my screenshots from my original post??

 

[corkyg]

"And what the heck happened to all my screenshots from my original post??

I see no change - there are still three of them as of right now. ?

 

[Maverick6969]

I see no change - there are still three of them as of right now. ?

Thanks for the confirmation Corky. Something must be going on with my browser. I'll load it up with Opera & IE and see if it's any different.