Event Detail - Crash dump disabled

[jalbao]

Can anyone fill me in on what this message means (I found it in the System Event Viewer), "Crash dump is disabled! NT failed to initalize the boot partition paging file for crashdump. This may be because the system has more than 3.8GB of physical memory."

I'm running NT4 sp6a - 512MBRam - I have two swappable Hard Drives of which one of them is not connected to my machine

 

[mreeves003]

How big is your system partition (C: drive)?

 

[jalbao]

5GB - I currently have 3Gig of free space. if it matters, i have 2 other partitions each at 12GB - i have plenty free space on each

 

[Mubashir]

This error occurs when the page file on the system partition is set to a value that is less than the size of physical RAM. To stop this error message from appearing, simply increase the page file size until it is larger than the amount of RAM that you have.

Ideally, page file must be size of the physical memory + 12MB, if you want NT to write the memory dump in case of a crash. In your case, if your system partition is 5GB, I assume it's an NTFS and if it's systemroot, it's your boot partition too. Check your page file configuration for system partition, it must be 512MB + 12MB. Reboot and everything should be fine. If you keep your page file on system/boot partition you should be able to save the crash dump.

I recommend setting the minimum and maximum value same to avoid fragmentation of paging file and to save system resources which NT might use while expanding and shrinking the file.

One more thing, for performance gain you can move the page file off the system partition to some other partition, preferably to other hard disk.

Happy hunting...

Mubashir

 

[jalbao]

problem resolved! thanks to all