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Memory dump not completing -- hard drive space issue?
My Inspiron 3800 is trying to complete a memory dump, and I *think* it's giving me a message that there isn't enough space on the hard drive to save the dump file (it flashes this info on the screen and then instantly reboots, so it's hard to read the information). I have an external hard drive because the internal HD is very small. There is about 200MB of free space on the internal drive. Is this not enough space for the memory dump? If so, how can I fix the problem? The machine will not let me boot in Safe Mode or any of the other modes -- just automatically starts the memory dump and then reboots when it can't be completed.
Hi, bacillus -- I was able to resolve the problem, although not through the method you suggested. I tried removing the 128MB memory card, but still got the same error message about the memory dump. So, I booted from the WinXP disk and ran the system recovery module. It didn't really give me any info about whether the recovery was successful -- just booted me out to DOS. But when I restarted the machine it loaded Windows smoothly and doesn't seem to be having any problems now!
Also -- I checked the memory dump settings in the System control panel, and it was already set at "small memory dump (64KB)". I changed it to "none" in the hopes of avoiding such a problem in the future.
One more item of note: when I successfully restarted Windows, it ran Scandisk and told me that there were a lot of fragments of lost files. I was able to then delete them through Disk Cleanup and my free space went from 200 MB to 450 MB. Not too important since I have the external HD, but I hope the extra space will improve system performance.
Thanks again for your suggestion!
bacillus
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Posted August 12th, 2005 17:00
I suspect that your memory dump settings is presently set at "complete memory dump" and there isn't enough hard drive space for it to complete its dump. For a complete memory dump you will need as much hard drive space as the amount of RAM that you have installed.
If you can't boot into safe mode then I am not sure how you can sort this out short of taking out some memory so that you have less than 200MB of memory installed.
If it does work then and you get to desktop, go into control panel> system properties> advanced> startup and recovery> settings and under "write debugging information" choose small memory dump (64KB) or none from the drop-down list.