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Is it possible to reserve a desired region of a given hard disk drive for placement of the pagefile.sys before enabling the page file on that drive?

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Windows only allows you to choose the drive letter on which the paging file resides, you cannot select a sector offset or range.

That said, if by "desired region" you would accept "separate partition" then yes, you may select a specified region on a disk. You would need to create a valid partition in the desired region and assign the partition a drive letter in within Windows. Then you would select the new drive letter as the paging file location.

I would recommend a flexible disk partitioning tool for sizing and creating the partition. A bootable live Linux distro with parted, gParted, or similar tool, should help.

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The "sector offset or range" you mentioned is what exactly I wanted. –  alfa Jul 30 '13 at 11:43
@alfa The only way I think you can make such choices is if you create a new partition in the desired range. Else, Windows does not offer such configuration. –  jscott Jul 30 '13 at 11:45
I expected to find some "defragment" generation of tools which would be able to consolidate the required amount of free disk space at the beginning of the disk and then create the pagefile.sys contiguously on that region. So that whenever we choose to put the pagefile on that drive the pre-allocated space is chosen and overwritten by Windows. –  alfa Jul 30 '13 at 11:50
@alfa I do not think you would be guaranteed the page file would remain in that location. If you're so inclined, you may like to do some experiments/testing and post your own answer here. See also: How do I defragment "C:\pagefile.sys" (the swapfile)? as well as the rest of the MyDefrag FAQ. –  jscott Jul 30 '13 at 11:56
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