A few months back, our server booted up and gave the 'Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupted, c:\winnt\system32\config\system'.
Tried a bunch of things, but ended up having to go back to an older copy of my SYSTEM registry. The file that went bad was 6,025,216 bytes, the one I restored was more like 5,900,000. I had to reinstall/reconfigure some applications, but the server came up OK.
Everything was fine for almost a month, and the server went down again and came up with that error. I logged in and restored a copy of the SYSTEM registry from a couple days before and everything seemed good. The 2nd bad file was almost the exact same same size as the original bad file, but slightly larger, maybe 20,000 bytles larger.
Yesterday, a week after the 2nd restore, we lost power and I did a graceful shutdown of the server. When it came back up, surprise surprise, I had the SAME error. I restored a copy of the SYSTEM registry file that I used a week before, and everything seemed good again. The 3rd bad file was the exact same size as the first, 6,025,216.
After this crash, I went through and updated all the drivers I could think of. I specifically updated the driver for our RAID controller, I also checked the configuration of our RAID controller to be sure WRITE CACHE was disabled, and I also checked the device manager properties of the array in Windows to be sure WRITE CACHE was disabled - it was in both places. I also ran Microsoft's RegClean utility for the heck of it. I also verified that the Maximum Registry Size in the SYSTEM control panel was set high - I moved it from a 91MB limit to a 120MB limit. The current size is about 30MB. I moved our swap file to D: to be sure we have plenty of space on the C: drive.
This morning we came in and that same error is on the screen again. I'm in the process of copying over a good version of that file again, but obviously something is mucked up. The 4th bad file was again the exact same size as the first, 6,025,216.
The system is a Compaq ProLiant dual processer P3 server, 1GB RAM, Exchange 2000, Symantec Anti-Virus 10.0, running all the latest patches.
At this point, I'm at a loss. I would normally suspect bad RAM, but I would think the crashes would be more random and not always related to the SYSTEM registry. I also find it extremely suspicious that the file size was exactly the same 3 out of 4 times it crashed, but I can't think of any reason it would be maxing out at that size.
Does anyone have any suggestions on this? I'm at a loss.
Tried a bunch of things, but ended up having to go back to an older copy of my SYSTEM registry. The file that went bad was 6,025,216 bytes, the one I restored was more like 5,900,000. I had to reinstall/reconfigure some applications, but the server came up OK.
Everything was fine for almost a month, and the server went down again and came up with that error. I logged in and restored a copy of the SYSTEM registry from a couple days before and everything seemed good. The 2nd bad file was almost the exact same same size as the original bad file, but slightly larger, maybe 20,000 bytles larger.
Yesterday, a week after the 2nd restore, we lost power and I did a graceful shutdown of the server. When it came back up, surprise surprise, I had the SAME error. I restored a copy of the SYSTEM registry file that I used a week before, and everything seemed good again. The 3rd bad file was the exact same size as the first, 6,025,216.
After this crash, I went through and updated all the drivers I could think of. I specifically updated the driver for our RAID controller, I also checked the configuration of our RAID controller to be sure WRITE CACHE was disabled, and I also checked the device manager properties of the array in Windows to be sure WRITE CACHE was disabled - it was in both places. I also ran Microsoft's RegClean utility for the heck of it. I also verified that the Maximum Registry Size in the SYSTEM control panel was set high - I moved it from a 91MB limit to a 120MB limit. The current size is about 30MB. I moved our swap file to D: to be sure we have plenty of space on the C: drive.
This morning we came in and that same error is on the screen again. I'm in the process of copying over a good version of that file again, but obviously something is mucked up. The 4th bad file was again the exact same size as the first, 6,025,216.
The system is a Compaq ProLiant dual processer P3 server, 1GB RAM, Exchange 2000, Symantec Anti-Virus 10.0, running all the latest patches.
At this point, I'm at a loss. I would normally suspect bad RAM, but I would think the crashes would be more random and not always related to the SYSTEM registry. I also find it extremely suspicious that the file size was exactly the same 3 out of 4 times it crashed, but I can't think of any reason it would be maxing out at that size.
Does anyone have any suggestions on this? I'm at a loss.
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