What keeps corrupting my XP registry?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Adam Corolla
  • Start date Start date
A

Adam Corolla

Last Sunday I tried to boot my system and got the message that the file:

Windows\system32\config\system

Was missing or corrupt. Turned out to be corrupt. I bought a new hard
drive and installed Windows with SP2 on it, spent days re-installing lots of
software and settings, then this morning I got the same error again. I
checked, and it is trying to boot to the new drive not the old one.

Now, the last text file modified on the respective partition after each time
this happened was the bugreport.txt from SpySweeper.

Here is the first section from each of them:

date/time : 2007-02-11, 12:54:20, 281ms
user name : <admin>
registered owner : p
operating system : Windows XP Service Pack 2 build 2600
system language : English
system up time : 1 hour
program up time : 59 minutes 49 seconds
physical memory : 2597/3071 MB (free/total)
free disk space : (E:) 29.02 GB (C:) 65.60 GB
display mode : 1216x676, 32 bit
process id : $5f0
allocated memory : 68.96 MB
executable : SpySweeper.exe
exec. date/time : 2007-01-25 21:58
version : 3.3.1.2592
madExcept version : 3.0c
callstack crc : $7c80a260, $7b27c3eb, $5aa72aa9
exception number : 3
exception class : EAccessViolation
exception message : Access violation at address 7C80A260 in module
'kernel32.dll'. Read of address 007A7000.



date/time : 2007-02-16, 06:19:50, 859ms
user name : <admin>
registered owner : p
operating system : Windows XP Service Pack 2 build 2600
system language : English
system up time : 1 hour 21 minutes
program up time : 1 hour 21 minutes
physical memory : 2590/3071 MB (free/total)
free disk space : (C:) 63.32 GB
display mode : 1216x684, 32 bit
process id : $15c
allocated memory : 30.22 MB
executable : SpySweeper.exe
exec. date/time : 2007-01-25 21:58
version : 3.3.1.2592
madExcept version : 3.0c
callstack crc : $7c80a260, $7b27c3eb, $1200beec
exception number : 2
exception class : EAccessViolation
exception message : Access violation at address 7C80A260 in module
'kernel32.dll'. Read of address 007A7000.


Any thoughts on this? I'm guessing faulty RAM, so I removed the 3 GB of RAM
I installed last summer and put back the two 512 MB modules.
 
Here are the details on my system:


The motherboard is an Albatron model K8X800 ProII, which is a socket 754
mobo with the VIA K8T800/8237 chipset.

Proc is An Athlon 64 2800+

It had three 1-GB modules of DDR 400 DIMMs, I removed those and put back the
two Crucial brand 512 MB DDR DIMMs.

ATI Radeon 1600x (specifically, the SAPPHIRE 100187L Radeon X1600PRO 256MB
GDDR2 AGP 4X/8X HDMI HDCP Video Card - Retail version)

SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit

Four SATA hard drives first crash (then I added an IDE drive as well, see
below) all NTFS; two 250-GB drives each with a single partition, and two
35-GB WDC raptors in a RAID 0 with a single partition used as the boot
volume on which Windows is installed.

Plextor CDRW/DVDRW drive on secondary controller as master.

PSU is a PC Power & Cooling Silencer 470 ATX

Nothing in the system is overclocked or ever has been.

In both crashes I was running Windows XP Pro with SP2 and all the critical
updates, SpySweeper Pro, ZoneAlarm free version, AVG antivirus and before I
shut down, FireFox 2 and IE7.

When the first crash occurred I assumed it was one of the Raptor drives
failing... I knew I was skating on thin ice relying on a RAID 0, so I kept
the important stuff backed up. After the crash, I bought an 80-GB WDC IDE
drive, jumpered it as master/single, connected it to the primary IDE
controller with no other drives on that cable, installed XP, downloaded
service packs, AV, firewall, spysweeper, etc, was about halfway through
getting the system set up the way I wanted when the "system" file got
corrupted again.
 
suspect memory
pull 1 stick swap if necessary

Adam Corolla said:
Here are the details on my system:


The motherboard is an Albatron model K8X800 ProII, which is a socket 754 mobo with the
VIA K8T800/8237 chipset.

Proc is An Athlon 64 2800+

It had three 1-GB modules of DDR 400 DIMMs, I removed those and put back the two Crucial
brand 512 MB DDR DIMMs.

ATI Radeon 1600x (specifically, the SAPPHIRE 100187L Radeon X1600PRO 256MB GDDR2 AGP
4X/8X HDMI HDCP Video Card - Retail version)

SoundBlaster Live! 24-bit

Four SATA hard drives first crash (then I added an IDE drive as well, see below) all
NTFS; two 250-GB drives each with a single partition, and two 35-GB WDC raptors in a
RAID 0 with a single partition used as the boot volume on which Windows is installed.

Plextor CDRW/DVDRW drive on secondary controller as master.

PSU is a PC Power & Cooling Silencer 470 ATX

Nothing in the system is overclocked or ever has been.

In both crashes I was running Windows XP Pro with SP2 and all the critical updates,
SpySweeper Pro, ZoneAlarm free version, AVG antivirus and before I shut down, FireFox 2
and IE7.

When the first crash occurred I assumed it was one of the Raptor drives failing... I
knew I was skating on thin ice relying on a RAID 0, so I kept the important stuff backed
up. After the crash, I bought an 80-GB WDC IDE drive, jumpered it as master/single,
connected it to the primary IDE controller with no other drives on that cable, installed
XP, downloaded service packs, AV, firewall, spysweeper, etc, was about halfway through
getting the system set up the way I wanted when the "system" file got corrupted again.
Click to expand...
 
Here are the details on my system:


The motherboard is an Albatron model K8X800 ProII, which is a socket 754
mobo with the VIA K8T800/8237 chipset.

Proc is An Athlon 64 2800+

It had three 1-GB modules of DDR 400 DIMMs, I removed those and put back the
two Crucial brand 512 MB DDR DIMMs.
Click to expand...

Just a thought or two,

With socket 754 you'll get the best performance by taking out the
two crucial 512's and putting in ONE 1GB dimm. When things are
working again you might play around with two dimms, but 754 likes
just one.

I'd say try a different boot drive to eliminate the current hard
drive as the culprit.
 
Just a thought or two,

With socket 754 you'll get the best performance by taking out the
two crucial 512's and putting in ONE 1GB dimm. When things are
working again you might play around with two dimms, but 754 likes
just one.

I'd say try a different boot drive to eliminate the current hard
drive as the culprit.
Click to expand...

From original post: "I bought a new hard drive and installed Windows with
SP2 on it, spent days re-installing lots of software and settings, then this
morning I got the same error again."
 
From original post: "I bought a new hard drive and installed Windows
with SP2 on it, spent days re-installing lots of software and settings,
then this morning I got the same error again."
Click to expand...

Ouch!

Burn a cd and test your memory. That should help eliminate that as a
problem.

http://www.memtest86.com/

Good luck,
Steve
 
SteveSch said:
Ouch!
Click to expand...



No ouch, really. He apparently missed that part of the post so I quoted it
for him--I wasn't intending to be snide or anything. Sometimes I miss parts
of posts too. My theory is that my brain can process information faster
than I can get it by reading, so I get impatient and skip ahead. I don't
know whether my theory is true or not, but it essentially suggests that I'm
just too darn smart, and I have a hard time arguing with that! ;-)

Burn a cd and test your memory. That should help eliminate that as a
problem.

http://www.memtest86.com/
Click to expand...

Thanks! Excellent suggestion.
 
No problem, MY bad.
Click to expand...


Just FYI, the memtest utility passed all tests, but I was running it on a
Pentium system rather than the Athlon--and in MemTest, there's a note in the
readme about some cheaper RAM generating errors on Athlon systems but
working fine on Pentium systems. That might have been what caused my
problems to start with.
 
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