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Negitive Numbers in Virtual Memory

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6 replies

by maggot 1 view

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Quick background here. I did a drive replacement on a Micron Millena. P3 667 MHz with Windows 98 SE OS. Old drive was a 15 Gig IBM. Replacement drive is a WD 40 Gig Caviar. Installed OS on new drive is Windows 98 SE. New drive read up correctly in CMOS and fdisk.

Upon completion of install and Device Manager look over I checked Virtual Memory settings and discovered negitive numbers in the drive volume.

Did some checking on the good old Micro$oft Knowledge Base. There was a write up on it stating that they were aware of this on drives over 32 Gig. The work around is to ignore this. The fix they say they have will cost you maybe.

Is the work around correct and what is the fix?
Should I be concerned about this?

6 replies

by thechas

I would run a few performance tests and see how well the system operates.

If everything seems fine, accept the strangeness.

I thought that this problem was limited to older drive controllers and BIOSes than would be on a PIII system.
Have you checked for a BIOS update?
What about the latest drivers for the chip-set on the motherboard?
Assuming an Intel chip-set, you may need to download an archived version to have the latest driver for a PIII chip-set.
If it is a VIA chip-set, read the notice about using an older version of the 4 in 1 driver posted at www.viaarena.com

Bugs like this are part of why I limit my W9X systems to partitions of less than 32GB.

You could use the remaining 8GB as a dedicated recovery and virtual memory drive.
Copy the Windows CD, drivers and related files to the drive.
Defrag the drive, and then set virtual memory to use this drive instead of the C: drive.

Chas

by rewrite

You don't really need to be concerned about it. The problem is in the display of the virtual memory size and not how windows handles it. Windows will continue to handle it correctly. You can get the fix if the display really bugs you.

Cheers.

RW

by maggot

Been awhile, sorry.

Ok, I scrubbed the drive and did a new install of Windows 98 SE, only this time I partitioned the drive. C:\= 31 GB and D:\= 7 GB (and change)

What do I need to do to use the second partition as Virtual memory and/or storage.

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