This article discusses issues that you must consider if you configure Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to dump physical memory to a location other than the boot volume.
By default, Windows Server 2003 writes memory dump information to the following location:
To modify this location, follow these steps:
- Click Start, right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
- Click the Advanced tab, and then click Settings under Startup and Recovery.
- In the Dump file box, type the path where you want Windows to write dump file information.
Consider the following scenario:
- You configure Windows Server 2003 to dump physical memory to a location other than the boot volume.
- Windows Server 2003 experiences a fatal error.
When Windows restarts after the fatal error, Windows requires a temporary file on the boot volume that is equal to the physical memory that is installed in the computer. If there is not enough hard disk space available to meet this requirement, the memory dump file is still generated. However, the pagefile size on this volume is reduced.
This behavior occurs because Windows Server 2003 introduces the following design changes for dump file generation:
SMSS requires a temporary file on the boot volume for the following reasons:
- In this scenario, SMSS can safely write only to the boot volume. The write operation for crashdump information ignores filter drivers.
Note The SMSS process cannot write a dump file to a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) array because the process skips filter drivers. Therefore, the temporary file should be written to a boot volume.
- In this scenario, SMSS uses the NtSetFileInformation function with the renaming operation to truncate the pagefile to the size of the temporary file. This function supports rename operations only on the same volume.
For more information about situations in which a Memory.dmp file is not created after a STOP error message, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Windows does not save memory dump file after a crash