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new hardware faulty?

R

Raybdbomb

Senior member
I just bought some hardware here on AT. It includes mobo, cpu, ram and PSU. When I put it all in a system, it's recognized fine. I installed winxp and let it run for about a day. I leave it on overnight and now (2nd night in a row) I get the message:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"

Googling led me to the mskb saying that it was a corrupt registry hive, and how to fix it. Fixing it worked, copying over from \WINDOWS\REPAIR

Anyway, my question is would you guess that this could be caused by hardware, or are you certain that it's a software issue...

Thanks
 
to clarify, i reformatted it after the first time i got the message. the only things i did after installing windows was windowsupdate and installed office 2k3, and office update.

i suppose it's possible it's my winxp disk, i'm going to try another today.
 
ok, the seller recommended that i reset the bios on the board, i did that and reinstalled XP from a different CD, and updated. after about 2 hours idling, it rebooted itself again...
 
I finall got an error message with a blue screen:
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, 0x00...0050. they said the issue is most likely RAM, so I ran memtest86 overnight. it did 24 passes and found no issues.

hmmm
 
Well I would run memtest to rule out memory issues, since that can corrupt the hard drive and cause the erorrs you are getting. Could be other things as well, but you didn't list the rest of the system specs.
 
yea, I ran memtest. it ran overnight, 27 passes and no errors. i've changed the hard drive (yes, reinstalled OS on a different HDD), cd-rom, and graphics card. i'll replace RAM (even if memtest passed), then I think that's the last thing I can really do... i'm not sure what to do after that...

the seller recommended i see if there are any errors with knoppix livecd. i'm comfortable with linux and i've used knoppix a few times, but I couldn't get it to boot for some reason.
 
ok, i tried swapping everything but the RAM, psu, CPU/hsf and mobo and each combo still had errors. so i found some ram that was compatible. I plugged it in, and it hasn't crashed since. with the previous ram it wouldn't be on for more than about an hour before crashing, but the new ram has lasted at least 20 hours now with no errors.

is it possible for ram to pass memtest with flying colors and still be bad?
 
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