On Tue, 27 Sep 2016 11:24:30 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

gargoyle60 wrote:

For windows 98 is it possible to have the pagefile split across
different drives in the same way as for Windows XP?

http://blog.zwiegnet.com/windows-ser...drive-windows/
(Found by an online search on: +"windows 98" +pagefile configuration).

Make sure the drive letters selected for splitting the pagefile are on
two physically different hard disks. You'll gain no performance if the
drives are on the same hard disk (e.g., C: and D: are 2 partitions on
the same HDD). Each drive must be a partition on a DIFFERENT hard disk.

This is to reduce overlap between disk writes on the samd HDD by having
writes from the OS files into one partition on one disk while writes for
the pagefile are into a partition on a different disk. Only if two
different disks are used for the partitions for the OS and [some of] the
pagefile can there be overlapped write file I/O.

As I recall, Windows will try to first use the pagefile space on the
non-OS drive. So make the non-OS partition on the 2nd HDD as big as you
want to encompass your worst-case scenario of paging. Do not set the
pagefile in the OS partition on the 1st HDD to zero. Instead set it to
1 to 1.5 times your system RAM size. That way, if your 2nd HDD fails
and gets disabled in the BIOS or removed then you still have sufficient
pagefile space back in the OS partition. The pagefile in the partition
on the 2nd HDD gets used first, if available, and then the pagefile in
the partition on the 1st HDD gets used second, if the other HDD's
pagefile is not usable or available.

Never set the pagefile to zero despite articles telling you to do so if
you have gobs of memory. The OS and some apps will still issue calls to
reserve some pagefile space even if there is more than enough system RAM
to accomodate all loaded programs in system memory. If there is zero
pagefile space, the OS and apps will error on those pagefile API calls
and error/crash or behave unexpectedly.

Remember: To split the pagefile requires two, or more, physically
separate hard disks (so the partitions containing the pagefile parts are
on different hard disks). "Drives" are lettering assignments to
partitions aka volumes. Some users equate drives with disks but they
are not the same. That's because the full name for disks is HDDs (Hard
Disk Drive). There are hard disk, optical, removable, flash, and other
type of drives (physical storage media) and drives that are letters
assigned to partitions/volumes.

For example, you might want something like:
Drive C: = HDD 0, partn 1 = OS partn (standard sized pagefile here)
Drive D: = HDD 1, partn 1 = data partn (big split pagefile over here)
Hard disks are enumerated starting with zero. Partitions are enumerated
starting with 1.

Thanks for the information. My online searches identified very little, perhaps I wasn't patient
enough to check ALL the references.

To add extra info…
My machine is very old (circa 1999). Pentium II 350MHz.
It already has the maximum possible RAM installed (768MB).
It has two separate HDD (2 x 4GB) so I can have W98 on drive 0 and the pagefile/swap-area/virtual
memory as the first partition on drive 1.
I shall also be using part of drive 1 for a Linux swap partition.

I am not intending to actually use W98 on a regular basis, it's just to serve as a backup for
converted MS-Access97 files if my main machine goes down for any reason. So in terms of personal
data I won't be needing much storage and might as well leave the OS and my data together on a single
partition.

By the way I use GParted generally to set my partition arrangements, so no problems anticipated in
that respect.