Windows 7 Paging file on hidden drive

Question

I am running Windows 7 X64 Pro and I had a extra 650Gig Hard Drive laying around that I thought would be a good candidate for turning it into a drive for keeping system restore and page file. Now the problem I am having is it is still showing up as a drive, i.e. E:. Is there a way to assign the page file to a drive without a drive letter? In the past I have tried to use a entire partition for a swap and keep getting a message saying that "Drive X is almost out of room". Am I going about this the wrong way? Is there a better way of doing this? I am running some pretty resource hungry programs CAD inpaticular and have already maxed out my RAM so I am trying to get every ounce of performance I can.

Answer 1

Try this trick of mounting it with an NTFS path: http://www.nerdscene.com/2010/03/31/143/

The details are a bit more in depth than will fit well in an answer here, but the general idea is to mount your swap partition as a path on your main drive, then remove the drive letter mapping.

After that, you need to twiddle with HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles by setting it to the path and min/max sizes of the file in MB (eg C:\Windows\Pagefile\pagefile.sys 10240 10240). By making the sizes identical, you prevent resize thrashing as you're going to dedicate this drive to swap use anyway.