Situation:
You used Ghost to clone from one disk on a computer to another disk on the same computer. You start the computer with both Primary bootable disks in the system and everything appears to function normally. When you remove the cloned destination drive and then start the computer, you see the message "Pagefile.sys is too small or does not exist."

If you reinstall the drive, the computer starts without this message.

Solution:
This problem may occur after booting into a Windows 2000 system with both the source and cloned drives still installed. The operating system does not properly handle the situation of having two primary hard drives attached. Symantec recommends that the cloned hard drive be removed before rebooting the computer. In the meantime, one of the following workarounds might resolve the problem.

• Run SysPrep on the computer before performing the Disk to Disk clone. See the document How to use SysPrep with Ghost.

• Use the -FDSP switch when performing the Disk to Disk clone, and then remove the target drive from the computer after cloning but before restarting the computer. The -FDSP switch prevents Ghost from automatically forcing a disk initialization, which Ghost does by default when imaging a Windows 2000 disk.

• If you are performing this procedure to backup the contents of the source disk, perform a Disk to Image operation instead of Disk to Disk. This saves an image of the source disk as a file on the destination disk.
  
• This problem sometimes happens when the original file Pagefile.sys is corrupt. To resolve the problem after cloning, delete the file and allow Windows to recreate it:
  1. Start the computer into the Windows 2000 Recovery Console. This allows you to access both NTFS and FAT partitions.
  2. Locate the file Pagefile.sys. By default, the file is located in the root of the drive on which Windows is installed. If it is not on that drive, search the root of other drives on the computer.
  3. Delete Pagefile.sys.
  4. Run Check Disk with the /r parameter:
     
     chkdsk /r
     
  5. Restart the computer. Windows recreates the file.

• If you see the problem after upgrading the source computer from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, you may be able to prevent the problem by installing Windows 2000 directly, rather than as an upgrade.

Technical Information:
Windows 2000 uses the file Pagefile.sys to store temporary information that does not fit into the computers Random Access Memory (RAM). This file is commonly known as the swap file, or virtual memory.

Document ID: 2001010515340025
Last Modified: 05/18/2005
Date Created: 01/05/2001
Operating System(s): Windows NT, Windows 2000
Product(s): Norton Ghost 2003