Windows without swap
Every time I think my opinion on windows cannot be any lower I am proven wrong. That’s also a way to push the limit…
A friend of mine had two versions of windows on his machine. He ask me to get rid of one of them and leave the windows 2000 installation. No problem: I used one of those smart partitioning tools where you can move existing partitions. Since the boot loader was on the other windows installation I had to re-install the boot loader.
- boot from your windows cd into the rescue console
- copy over the “ntldr” and the “ntdetect.com” from the i386 directory of your windows cd
- call “fixboot” and “fixmbr” to install the bootloader
Reboot and you see you windows installation come up …until it needs it’s virtual memory – its swap space. But of course the drive letters have changed. So there is no “D:” anymore. No way a “pagefile.sys” can be found there. So windows complains that there is no virtual memory configured. Too bad 256 MB is too less memory to login and configure it.
Googling revealed you should try fix the registry setting for the virtual memory from a remote computer. Too bad – the computer got no network connection. So the last chance was the rescue console. Unfortunately there are no command line tools to edit registry entries.
Again Google is your friend and helped to find a command line tool that could have helped to fix this problem …until we had to realize that you cannot call any external executables from the console.
Since we already spent way to much time on this we just reinstalled the whole system …just because we could not login without swap space. *shakes his head in disbelief*