Windows 2000 Pro file corruption

[Bob]

So am I.

Hopefully by the time I install it, it will be past the first SP and
reasonably stable.


--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO

 

[kony]

I still did not make myself clear. What I meant to say is that I do
not want to do a fresh install of an old operating system. I want to
wait for Vista so I can do a fresh install on a new operating systerm.
At most I would import profiles, but the applications I would
reinstall in order to get a fresh Registry.

That is certainly reasonable, and entirely your choice to
make. However, there are random issues that effect
everyone/every OS and Win2k is successfully ran by many. It
might not hurt to have Win2k working good too, especially as
a dual-boot environment while you migrate to Vista.

I likely will not because I believe it is something deeply embedded in
the system. This install has gone far beyond its lifetime so the fact
that it acts up is not surprising.

I suspect part of the problem is that current applications are being
compiled for XP, to the detriment of Win2K.

I doubt it, very much.

That's MS's sneaky way to
get users to upgrade. I have seen several applications not run in
Win2K but run in XP (my son runs XP so I have a reference).

MS might be a bunch of sneaky b***tards sometimes but I
really dont' think this is one of the ways they'd do it.
They really really want you to use NTFS, and do have a
certain bit of integrity when it comes to basic things like
file corruption.

As long as CHKDSK fixes things, I am not going to waste a lot of time
on it.

I'd continue to focus most on the motherboard, it's bios,
and drivers. The alternative is of course a clean Win2k
installation but you make it out to be harder than it is-
you have the spare drive(s), it's not like you have to do a
full blown and tweaked environment like you have now rather
than simply starting up a fresh install, clicking a few
times then installing the drivers. That's less than 1 hour
total and only a few minutes of hands-on time to do it. It
eliminates the variable of the apps you suspect (which still
dont' seem possible to cause...), isolates more the prior
board/bios/drivers/OS.

 

[kony]

Hopefully by the time I install it, it will be past the first SP and
reasonably stable.

You are an incredibly patient person. I'd have replaced
half the system before I'd wait around for Vista SP1,
if/when there were potential file corruption issues present.

There's also the outside chance someone in another group
knows better what's going on with your system, you might
post this to the motherboard (brand) newsgroup(s). If you
encounter a bunch of whiney MS zealots that just tell you to
try XP, you might even claim you run XP too (a bit dishonest
but sometimes people have to be kept on track,
unfortunately).

 

[Bob]

I'd continue to focus most on the motherboard, it's bios,
and drivers.

I have no reason to suspect the MB, et al. The reason is because this
problem shows intermittency independent of the MB, et al.

IOW, when I had the old AV installed, the system would crash almost
every day. When I uninstalled it, no crashed whatsoever.

Now that I have Avast installed, it only crashes once a week. Such
behavior would not be the case if the MB were responsible.

The alternative is of course a clean Win2k

installation but you make it out to be harder than it is-
you have the spare drive(s), it's not like you have to do a
full blown and tweaked environment like you have now rather
than simply starting up a fresh install, clicking a few
times then installing the drivers. That's less than 1 hour
total and only a few minutes of hands-on time to do it. It
eliminates the variable of the apps you suspect (which still
dont' seem possible to cause...), isolates more the prior
board/bios/drivers/OS.

I thought about doing a Q&D Win2K install and put the AV product in. I
may do that, because once I get that far, the rest is not as big a
deal as I make out. It is a pain to reinstall things that I have not
installed in years, but I have everything I need somewhere - it's just
a matter of finding it.


--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO

 

[Bob]

You are an incredibly patient person. I'd have replaced
half the system before I'd wait around for Vista SP1,
if/when there were potential file corruption issues present.

I have upgraded several times because of corruption. I decided not to
again. I am tired of this Windows crap of having to rebuild all the
time.

There's also the outside chance someone in another group
knows better what's going on with your system, you might
post this to the motherboard (brand) newsgroup(s).

I have already posted to many groups and no one has a clue what's
going on. Something in Windows is failing to run to completion on
shutdown and that is corrupting the NTFS filesystem.

--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO

 

[kony]

I have no reason to suspect the MB, et al. The reason is because this
problem shows intermittency independent of the MB, et al.

Ok, but mass shedloads of people run win2k now and/or in the
past w/o this problem...

IOW, when I had the old AV installed, the system would crash almost
every day. When I uninstalled it, no crashed whatsoever.

Now that I have Avast installed, it only crashes once a week. Such
behavior would not be the case if the MB were responsible.

Ok, you are the only one who has this system in front of
you... I can tell you that of the systems I have with win2k,
it is extremely stable, only a gaming system crashes from
game bugs. IMO, it's highly worthwhile to get win2k running
well, it is a very good OS for one needing Windows but not
needing *user help* that WinXP tacks on.

The alternative is of course a clean Win2k

I thought about doing a Q&D Win2K install and put the AV product in. I
may do that, because once I get that far, the rest is not as big a
deal as I make out. It is a pain to reinstall things that I have not
installed in years, but I have everything I need somewhere - it's just
a matter of finding it.

There are other alternatives too... for example, even though
many claim things such as "can't move apps because of
registry or files", it is possible. Copy the app folder,
navigate to the registry Current_User and Hardware, Software
keys and export, merge the registry info. On occasion other
files might be in the user folder or winnt/system32 (etc)
folders but those can be taken as wait-n-see if it runs.

IOW, big difference between a quick-n-dirty install and one
needed for permanent use, the quick install can co-exist so
the other is available for use or files/registry/etc. It
can also help to just export entire registry keys so they're
available later for reference.

 

[Bob]

Ok, but mass shedloads of people run win2k now and/or in the
past w/o this problem...

So did I until I installed CA AV.

There is a Windows command that loads just the "protected DLLs" from a
cache. It's something like SRC or whatever. I used it before to
refresh the critical system files and it fixed a problem. But I have
forgotten it.

it's highly worthwhile to get win2k running
well, it is a very good OS for one needing Windows but not
needing *user help* that WinXP tacks on.

I am a Win2K fan, that's why I stayed away from XP. My son runs XP and
has had to reinstall it from scratch several times.


--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO

 

[WinXP_Powered]

So did I until I installed CA AV.

There is a Windows command that loads just the "protected DLLs" from a
cache. It's something like SRC or whatever. I used it before to
refresh the critical system files and it fixed a problem. But I have
forgotten it.

The command is SFC (System File Checker). You can find it easily in the
Help.

I've been following this thread going back and forth in my thoughts as
to whether your problem is software or hardware--until I read this line,
"So did I until I installed CA AV."

That leads to me to 2 possible explanations: 1)CA AV replaced some MS
system files (devices are known to do that, so I suppose your AV program
could); or 2)CA AV corrupted your Registry.

HK_DYN_DATA is the part of the registry loaded into RAM, which basically
shows you what parts of the registry are in use at the time you view
that hive in Regedit or Regedt32. There are some excellent tools at
Sysinternals.com (FREE) to trace everything that runs at startup, and I
do mean everything! Another excellent tool they have is their process
viewer.

There used to be a way in NT 4.0 to run Setup and have it replace the
Registry with a "virgin" copy, just the way it is when the OS is first
installed. I was told it was for debugging purposes during the OSes
development and was left in the production release. Of course, doing
that leaves all your apps and their associated DLLs, etc., orphaned on
the hard drive (at least till you reinstall the apps).

Does anyone know of a way to replace the Registry with a "fresh" copy in
Win2K and Win XP, as there was in NT 4.0?

 

[WinXP_Powered]

Have you tried this group?

microsoft.public.win2000.file_system (on msnews.microsoft.com)

There are a lot of very knowledgable MVPs at those MS newsgroups.

Good luck, Bob!

John
----------

 

[Bob]

IOW, big difference between a quick-n-dirty install and one
needed for permanent use, the quick install can co-exist so
the other is available for use or files/registry/etc. It
can also help to just export entire registry keys so they're
available later for reference.

There is one thing I noticed that may have relevance. You know how
Windows takes its good old time shutting down. All of a sudden my
Win2K was shutting down much faster than usual.

There is a key in the Registry called:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Memory
Management\ClearPageFileAtShutdown

If that key is zero, Win2K will shutdown faster. However that might
cause some other problem, so I changed it back to its default which is
1.

I have no idea how it got changed to zero, other than I may have run
some tweak program that changed it.

I will have to wait about 1 week to see if this fixed things. But now
the shutdown seems to take the old longer amount of time.




--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO

 

[Bob]

The command is SFC (System File Checker). You can find it easily in the
Help.

Yeah, but only if you know it to begin with.

There are some excellent tools at
Sysinternals.com (FREE) to trace everything that runs at startup, and I
do mean everything! Another excellent tool they have is their process
viewer.

I have both. There is another that warns you about new startups.

Does anyone know of a way to replace the Registry with a "fresh" copy in
Win2K and Win XP, as there was in NT 4.0?

Check the so-called In-Place Upgrade (IPU) repair. I have used it
before, but it takes some work and can mess up your Profile settings.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;292175
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306952/EN-US/



--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO

 

[don]

Are't you on record as being blindly against service packs?

 

[Bob]

After doing several things I believe I may have fixed the NTFS disk
corruption problem.

1) Got rid of Computer Associates EZ Trust anti-virus package.
Replaced it with Avast Home Edition. That alone reduced the frequency
of corruption significantly. I do not believe it was the only factor,
but it was a major contributor. The good news is that Avast is free
and well supported on an active forum of knowledgeable users.

2) Thoroughly scrubbed the Registry with four rather aggressive
Registry cleaners. Of course, I made a clone backup just in case. But
I did not need it. Tons of crap was cleaned out of the Registry. Do
not attempt this without a clone backup.

3) Changed the "ClearPageFileAtShutdown" key to 1. Now the system
takes the usual amount of time to shut down. I believe this is the
default, which means some program I installed changed it. The
corruption was always occuring on shutdown, so maybe this alone is the
cure.

4) Ran "sfc.exe /scannow" which restores system files. I had to use
the distribution disk which indicates that the cached dlls were
changed.

There may be more to come, but thus far I am pleased with the results.


--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO

 

[kony]

Are't you on record as being blindly against service packs?

No, it was never a matter of blind, always being
discriminate about what the goal, need, was and whether the
packs address it. There is a reasonable expectation based
on MS track record that an OS release of this magnitude will
have significant bugs.

Further, 'tis better to install an OS with the service pack
initially (even slipstreamed) rather than risk taking down a
working production (or otherwise needed) system by applyingn
patches that may not be needed, rather than patching it
originally before deployment and then testing that it works-
leaving a working system static unless explict need arises
to change it.

 

[don]

Well I guess we do agree (in principal anyway).

However since I deal with approximatly 250 machines a day I simply do not
have the time to discrininate between patches. Also, I too have a boss and
if I install all critical updates and there is a problem, then I have done
everything (in that respect) in my power; on the other hand if I do not
apply the patches and here is a problem then .....LUCY!!! YOU GOT SOME
SPLAININ TO DO!!!.

Self preservation I guess.

Also, I thank the gods every payday that Microsoft works the way it does.

 

[Mxsmanic]

However since I deal with approximatly 250 machines a day I simply do not
have the time to discrininate between patches. Also, I too have a boss and
if I install all critical updates and there is a problem, then I have done
everything (in that respect) in my power; on the other hand if I do not
apply the patches and here is a problem then .....LUCY!!! YOU GOT SOME
SPLAININ TO DO!!!.

My method is to do the explaining.

 

[JAD]

I have upgraded several times because of corruption. I decided not to
again. I am tired of this Windows crap of having to rebuild all the
time.


I have already posted to many groups and no one has a clue what's
going on. Something in Windows is failing to run to completion on
shutdown and that is corrupting the NTFS filesystem.

is this an IDE drive? have you applied the IDE cache patch?

 

[Bob]

is this an IDE drive?

Yes, it is an IDE drive. I am running Win2K Pro with SP4.

have you applied the IDE cache patch?

What "IDE cache patch"?


--

"To achieve One World Government it is necessary to remove
from the minds of men their individualism their loyalty to
family traditions and national identification."
--Brock Chisholm, Director of UN WHO