virtual mem in xp pro - cant create page file! :s

[projectinfinity]

ok, well this is the first time ive experienced this in 5 years of computing.. basically "one random day" i turned on my pc, and when on the welcome screen, it just hangs, i tracked this down to pressing alt-tab witch displays a box in the background, telling me i "have no pagefile or my page file is too smal. goto control panel"... etc, so i think easy enough just go and re-set my virtual memory... yet i do this, re boot and says the same thing! then i go back to the settings and it tells me ive stil lgot my custom settings (i have 512ram, and set the min to 400 and the max to 1gig) but in the bottom, where it says pagefile used, says 0 .. hmm im thinkin.. i decide to delete the page file restart and re set a pagefile, but when i search for my "pagefile.sys" i dont even have one!! i think reinstalling windows might be the answer, but i left the disk at my parents house so plz does anyone know another way round this? it would be greatly appreciated.
chris
i have windows xp pro
amd athlon 1.3ghz
512 mb sd ram
10 gig and a 5 gig hard disk
ntl broadband
geforce 4 mx 64mb video card
soundblaster awe 32

 

[Peahippo]

I strongly suspect there's something about this that you don't know or haven't told us, but let's give it a try.

Either you've run out of disk space, or your swapfile settings are haywire, or your OS itself is corrupted.

Firstly, confirm that you've enough free space available on your hard disks. I believe that you said you've a 10GB drive and a 5GB drive. If one drive is too full, then rely on the other one to hold the swapfile.

Secondly, release your custom settings for the swapfile. You'd have to have a pretty specific reason for having custom settings. For this problem right now, let Windows manage the swapfile on its own. Of course, if the settings indicate the swapfile is on a drive that is getting too full, then you'll have to customize the settings to go to another drive. Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q314105 may be of some use to you here.

Thirdly, things should be working at this point. With enough space, and no screwy custom settings, the swapfile should function. If not ... then I would be forced to assume that the OS is corrupt.

Like I said, there may well be other things going on that we don't know about, so investigate carefully before deciding to reload the OS.