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W2K, Clean Install, Registry Corrupts After 4 Days, Help...

F

Fermilevel

Member
I've been around computers quite a while, but this one has me stumped. I have a friend who just got one of those Fry's EPOX 8KTA3+ mainboards with a 1.2GHz CPU and put together his own system. His components are all name brand (except RAM) and appear to be respectible quality (though I have no experience with EPOX).

Anyway, we used a DOS program to erase the first 10 cylinders of his hard-drive (MBR) and started fresh with W2K. Everything works great. Installed all drivers and it runs perfect for a few days.

After about 3 or 4 days, he'll turn on his computer and W2K gets past the Windows logo and goes straight to BSOD. I've looked up the error and it is a generic registry error (STOP C0000218 Registry File Error...). It also says it's in WINNT/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SOFTWARE.

This has happened about 8 times now. He does absolutely nothing to his system or software prior this error, and the error always happens during a cold boot only. Can't boot in safe or any other mode afterwards. Only option so far is to reinstall everything.

If anybody has had this happen, please let me know what may be going on and give me ideas to fix this. I'm running out of options trying to help this guy.

Thanks in advance.
 
Hate to tell you this but it looks like the good old format c: command is going to have to come in to play this time. I don't really now what is going on other than that the HD might have some bad sectors. Hope someone else has a better solution for ya.
 
If he has a fast hardrive with a large cache (2mb), it could be that he is suffering from the fast shutdown bug. If you make an ERD, you can use it to restore the registry(won't help you this time, if you haven't).

Symptom #1: Never happens when you restart, only when you shut down.
Symptom #2: Never happens with Standard PC Hal, only ACPI Hal.

There was a registry key you had to add, but I can't find/remember it. I believe it may have been fixed in SP2. Install SP2 if you already haven't.

What I did until I fixed mine:

When you want to shut down your computer, pick "restart" from the shut down menu, right before your computer POST's, just shut down the power. I leave my computer on 24/7, so it wasn't that big a problem for me.

Good luck. (make that ERD! and make sure you keep an updated registry on it!)
 
Thanks for the help! I will perform a surface scan to rule that one out.

The problem seems to be independent of SP1 and SP2. I've tried both. I remember the fast IDE thing and will look for the patch (He has a new Maxtor 30Gb ATA100).

Will definitely make the ERD's. He didn't have a floppies--I guess it's time he went and bought some.

Thanks again, and if you can think of anything else, it would be greatly appreciated!

 
Since its happened so many times, if he were to use that modified shut down I showed you, it shouldn't take long to see if that is it. I'll look through my file archives to see if I can find that registry key.
 
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