Having a bit of a problem here...

[nerdawg4]

Recently my windows install (Windows XP Professional) quit working. I restarted one day and it would get to the boot screen, then restart, it would repeat. So, I reformatted. Well, same problem. Did it one more time thinking that the Windows Update had caused the problem, and this time I got the error "\windows\system32\config\system" (I believe this is the registry) was corrupt or missing after I restarted.

I can run Fedora Core 2 (the only other OS I had on a disk here) without any problems, if this helps to eliminate any hardware problems, that's good.

So, I was asking for help at some other places, and suggestions included:
- Bad hard drive (checked this with the seagate utilities)
- Bad ram (not really sure how to test this, but I am not sure if ram just up and dies or not)
- Bad XP install disk (one guy had a 2000 disk that was starting to crack and he could install fine, but had no luck getting windows to start right) is this possible?

So as you can see, I am a bit perplexed as to what my problem is.

Well today I was lookig around at microsoft support and found this. It says I could have a bad CPU, disk controller, cache, or memory, among other things. Well, this pretty much makes it possible for anything to be wrong with my system.

So, I know you all are pretty with it, what do you think my problem is? Is there any way to test individual components (I did test the hard drive) to see if they need to be replaced? I know some of you have probably had this problem before, what did you do about it? What would you do about it?

System Specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
Gigabyte 7N-400 L1 (or something close to that)
Seagate 80GB ATA 100 8MB
Radeon 9500 Pro
Crucial 256MB
Antec 350Watt PSU
2 Optical Drives and a Floppy

EDIT: I had one more thought: I know my Motherboard drivers are not the problem because they never have been before at a fresh install. But I did get the latest Catalyst drivers at my install, is it possible that is writing to the registry at shutdown? If anyone has a good justification for this being the problem, let me know, I can use some older drivers I have here that still work.

 

[D3v1an7]

Run Memtest86 to test the RAM
Download and run the diagnostics utility from your HD manufacturer

You may also have a bad PS. Try swapping it out to test it.

reset your bios and then do a complete format of the drive (not quick) when you install XP

 

[nerdawg4]

I follow everything there except the reset of the BIOS, do you mean just reset it to the defaults? or something else?

 

[gwai lo]

clear the cmos, change the jumper from 1-2 to 2-3 and leave it there for a couple minutes (at least this is the procedure for most of the mobo's I've seen, check your manual)

 

[lithium726]

clear the cmos, change the jumper from 1-2 to 2-3 and leave it there for a couple minutes (at least this is the procedure for most of the mobo's I've seen, check your manual)

if there is no jumper, remove the battery for a few mins

since you can run fedora, run some stressing tests to see if something is failing... does prime exist for linux? maybe sandra? see if your scores are screwed up?

 

[nerdawg4]

Well, I did three things at once (I should have done them separately to see what the problem was, but Oh well)

- Wrote entire hard drive to 0's
- Reset the CMOS (had to remove the battery due to the lack of a jumper on the motherboard)
- Used a different driver for my graphics card (I think this was the problem, probably writing to the registry improperly at shutdown or something like this)

Anyway, so far all my windows updates are going well, downloading SP2. No problems yet.

Thanks for the help guys! Hope this helps someone else with the same problem someday.