Vista problems..

[PsychoFanatic]

Ok so this about the third day of this, it all started out when i rebooted my vista 64 system because it had been acting really really slow, reboot and lo and behold i cant boot
vista loads with the progress bars thing or w/e, goes to black screen, then reboots, does the same thing over, and over again. ok so i hit f8 on bootup and try safe mode/ last known good configuration/ no dice. so i choose on the f8 menu to not automatically reboot on a system failure, reboot does the progress bars thing then BSOD's with the message of:
STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
the initial session process or system process temrinated unexpectedly with a status of 0x00000000 (0xc0000001 0x001005a0).
the system has been shut down

go to M$ and attempt to lookup the error codes, find nothing matching my entry, google it, find nothing either oddly enough, a few with the stop: c000021a but not the exact error.

so i figure time to do system restore and other repair options, loadup my vista dvd, do startup repair reboot, no change. do system restore, no effect, still stuck, then i do bootrec /fixboot, reboot nothing yet again, do bootrec /fixmbr , reboot nothing, then restart and do BOTH and reboot and nothing, I figure maybe i need to try system restore now? after fixing the boot, well try that but now i don't have any system restores? so no dice on that.
so i do some serious googling and come across this blog from some guy that had a very similar problem and said that his problem was the software hive of the registery was becoming corrupt and fixed it by using REG RESTORE command to load a backup, tried that, and got nothing, went and tried it for all of the HKLM keys in the registery but still nothing. so i figured it was time to just do a clean install.

I vista into a clean partition (a different one, not the original borked partition, but on the same disk). booted up all was fine, loaded drivers, updates, etc. all was going well. i went to install sp1 computer rebooted, but it gets stuck at configuring updates on the welcome screen which i read is a problem and M$ ended up putting out a hotfix for it, but that doesn't help me when i can't boot, so i booted again from my vista dvd ran system restore, restored from before i installed sp1, rebooted, and all was well, finally or so i thought.

so today i reboot after installing some more M$ updates that got rolled back with the system restore as well, and the boot up screen takes forever, i get the progress bars then a black screen for like 5 minutes, then log in screen log in then another black screen for like 5 minutes, then finally excruciatingly slowly i get to the desktop, i reboot try again thinking it might just be a once off, but it did it again, and i should add after starting up it was still laggy as ever like i could move the mouse but opening anything took minutes. reboot try safe mode, i get the same result. so i resort to google and look around a while and find some posts on some forums that people were having long bootimes as well and they disabled some services namely SERVER service. so i do that, and they also suggested doing a diagnostic boot, so i did that through msconfig, but yet again lol no dice. so i go yet again and boot the vista dvd do system restore reboot, still the same...reboot try fixboot and fixmbr stuff but again nothing. so i boot up again and i notice that on my sidebar gadget for cpu usage, my physical memory was showing 95% usage which was really odd as i have 4 gigs of ram, so i open up task manager and find that apparently i only have 256mb of ram? i launched cpuz and it showed 4gb of ram.....so i'm thinking this might be ram related? i took out all my sticks of ram and put one stick in no dice, rebooted changed the slot again, and again through all of them with both sticks but got nothing still showing 256mb of ram.

So i'm running memtest atm, has showed nothing so far, i also tried updating my bios, but that didn't work either.

so if anyone has any suggestions please please help!, as this is incredibly frustrating i will update this thread with memtests results once it is finished.

Cliffs:
1. Vista took a shit being incredibly slow
2. rebooted to fix, now i couldn't boot, endlessly restarted, tried all repair options on vista disk nothing.
3. tried to fix my registry which google told me might be the problem. but backup registry's did nothing.
3. gave up on that install installed vista in a different partition on the same drive.
4, everything went well till i installed sp1 which failed and froze at configuring updates welcome screen, and then wouldn't boot.
5. ran system restore fixed problem, all was well till i rebooted after installing some windows updates.
6. boot took 5 mintues after getting to desktop, programs would take minutes to open.
7. tried other system restore again, and other repair options to no effect.
8. i realized during these reboots that vista was using 95% of my ram at all times which was weird because i have 4gb's of ram, opened task manager found i only have 256mb of ram???
9. tried testing my ram putting each stick in every different slot and rebooting after each change, got nothing. updated my bios, nothing.
10. am running memtest as we speak will update thread with outcome.

[bigdogchris]

Pull the hard drive, hook it up to another working system then run a full malware and virus scan on it.

[PsychoFanatic]

don't have another system to hook it up to, but i just booted up Avira's AntiVir rescue disk that was a bootable linux based virus scanner, found nothing... so if not a virus then what lol? memtest reported no errors on 500+ passes.

[DeaconFrost]

Maybe it has something to do with the M$ that you insist on using. That kiddie crap gets old quick. If you had all these issues, and you honestly feel that way about Microsoft, why not load Ubuntu?

Now, as for the actual help, you skipped two very important troubleshooting steps for these types of issues. First, check your board for a BIOS update. Second, assuming you have the latest BIOS, try resetting the CMOS. Moving down the line, most often, issues caused by installing SP1 are due to old drivers.

My suggestion would be this. Check the BIOS. If that doesn't solve anything, backup your data and run a diag on the hard drive. Wipe the drive clean, reset the CMOS, and then set your BIOS options again. Install Vista fresh on a blank drive, and install SP1 immediately, before any other apps or drivers. If possible, borrow SP1 media from a friend to skip a step. See how that goes, and then post the results, and we'll go from there.

[PsychoFanatic]

1st. i'm quite sure you'd be just as angry as i was when i typed that post to include things like M$ that maybe i shouldn't have. it's quite aggravating. but moving beyond that, as you will notice i did update the bios, as i said in the cliffs, and the OP, so we'll call ourselves even.

secondly cleared CMOS just know, figured i didn't need too after updating bios, and loading optimized defaults, but i did and no dice.

and i doubt the drivers were the issue at least the fact that they were old at any rate, as all my drivers are the latest available as of 3 days ago. and i wasn't trying to reinstall it, the update i referred to after were regular updates.

[heatlesssun]

Do you have another hard disk to try?

[DeaconFrost]

1st. i'm quite sure you'd be just as angry as i was when i typed that post to include things like M$
I've been quite frustrated and angry, but that certainly wouldn't bring me to pull the kiddie names, like M$ and Micro$haft....especially for something that doesn't appear to be a Vista problem, but a hardware issue instead. That's why I suggested some hardware fixes that are in tune with the advice heatlesssun suggested.

[PsychoFanatic]

i have an old old 20gb ide hard drive, 20gb should be enough for a vista install?

[DeaconFrost]

Yes, that should be planety for a test install. However, if your current 500 GB drive is an SATA drive, that isn't going to eliminate as many factors as possible. If your 500 GB drive is an SATA, I'd probably run a disk diag on it first.

[PsychoFanatic]

ok, i have the Ultimate boot CD i'll run Data lifeguard for my WD 500 GB drive, and yes its sata. i'll update with the results

[PsychoFanatic]

so far quick test is good, i have another half hour till the extended test is done, will update when its done.