06-06-2002, 10:37 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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A bug bite that stings
http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/lev2/67/lev3/70/pid/779/qid/101860
This has nothing to do with our Pocket PCs, but I think this is important enough to pass on to you. Have you ever booted up your Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer only to be presented with a message that says something about the "windows\ system32 \config \system" directory? It might say the HIVE file is corrupt, the registry is corrupt, or that your system.log file in the /software directory is corrupt. There are around six variations on this error, but they all result in the same thing: a completely dead OS that is very difficult to recover from. Searching the Microsoft Knowledgebase at the time, I discovered nothing of any help. A complete reinstall seemed to be the only choice.
Last year I was installing Windows 2000 onto several brand new computers for my church. Two of the four computers received this error - I wasn't sure what to make of it. All the machines were ASUS A7V mobos, Duron CPUs, and ATA-100 hard drives. Over the next six months, two more of the machines had the same problem. I suspected flaky ATA-100 hardware or drivers. Fast forward to today - my own XP machine (also an ASUS A7V) died with the same error two weeks ago. This was the third time I'd seen this problem on my rig - twice with 2000, once with XP. What was going on?
I decided to research the problem more thoroughly than last time, and on the site linked above I found hundreds and hundreds of people who had the same problem. They all had different motherboards, RAM, CPUs - the only commonality was Windows 2000 or XP (and newer hardware, typically fast ATA-100 hard drives). The theory that makes the most sense is this: Windows 2000/XP have accelerated shutdown routines, and they shut down the machine before the registry is finished being written to. Sometimes this causes the registry to mis-report its file size, and on the next boot the OS will report it as being corrupt. The same thing can happen to other critical system files. The fix is to get into the recovery console and copy the backups over, but when I did this I ended up with a blank profile in XP and the computer asking me to reinstall every piece of hardware over again - it was easier for me to restore a backup from two weeks earlier.
I'm not normally one to believe in conspiracies, but I believe Microsoft has known about this problem for over a year and they've done nothing about it. Someone re-published a KB article that seemed to address the problem, but it doesn't exist on the live site anymore. The only way to prevent this (hopefully) is to reboot your machine instead of powering it down, and when it reboots to the BIOS screen, punch the power button. Every other solution I've seen seems to be only partially successful (slowing down RAM speed, etc.). I could be completely wrong on this, but I've seen this problem enough times to know how serious it is - and I wanted to warn you all about it.
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06-06-2002, 11:27 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 27
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Win 2000 quick shutdown
I simply loaded the 2 second delay patch for my motherboard a year ago when I read about it. Certainly no prob so far but then again we are talking about MS here :-)
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06-06-2002, 11:58 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 17
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Use Hibernation
I have avoided this problem by using 'Hibernation' instead of Shutdown, much faster than reloading XP or 2000. But from what I have heard is that this problem tends to occur with VIA chip sets and AMD CPU's, I beleive that AMD has a patch.
I myself have never had this problem on any of my personal machines, but I have seen this problem several times, but strange as it may sound it has only happend using VIA chip sets and AMD CPU's in combination with Maxtor and Western Digital ATA-100 HD's, and have never had this problem with IBM ATA-100 HD's. Most of my personal systems are built around the Abit KT7-100 or MSI KT3 Ultra Motherboards and I always use IBM HD's (Models 120GXP and 60GXP, but not the 75GXP(they have had reliability problems))
Just my observation - YMMV
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06-07-2002, 12:37 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 108
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Oh yeah I had this happen at least three times a year ago with a new system I built last year running 2k. The motherboard was MSI (I forget the model) with a 133Mhz system bus Anthlon. I was also running the bus mastering driver for ATA 100. There was no recovery. Believe me I tried. I re-installed Win2k twice, and on the 3rd crash I gave up and ran Win98 for a while. This machine would also lock up occasionally doing video stuff. It ran rock solid under Win98.
About Summer of 2001, I was pursuaded to try Win2k again after hearing of some big improvements made to the BIOS. When I went to the site to grab a bios update I found that they were releasing new drops about every other week for the first 7 months the board was out. I flashed the BIOS, wiped the drive and put 2k back on and it was rock solid. Now I run Xp on it and still stable.
So my guess is that is might be BIOS firmware problems with specific chipsets. Good luck.
JohnM
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06-07-2002, 03:38 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 95
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It's so ironic that this was posted today, as I had the same problem myself this morning and am planning on reinstalling XP this weekend on my rig (Asus A7V133, 1.33 gig Athlon Thunderbird, 80 gig Maxtor hard drive).
My solution so far has been threefold. First, I install XP without ACPI (press F7 during XP install) to disable automatic shutdown. Second, I regularly backup my registry with the excellent ERUNT (http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/). When my registry gets corrupted, I boot up with the blank default registry and restore my registry. Third, I disabled write caching in the driver properties tab for my hard drive.
It doesn't work all the time, but it's pretty good. I've looked for patches for my processor/motherboard, but can't seem to find anything. Must not be looking hard enough...
Of course, on my recent install of XP I still had an unexpected reboot the other day, and now I'm getting lots of random errors in IE and Outlook. This has happened a couple of times as well, and the only way I've found to fix this is to reinstall XP. On the plus side, I've got my entire reinstall process from scratch down to 2 hours.
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06-07-2002, 05:15 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 157
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Is this only a problem on Win2000/XP?
I've had endless BSOD problems (not with this particular error message, but similar) ever since I got my AMD Duron machine. Have upgraded the memory and the OS from Win98 to WinMe, but with little apparent success in shaking these inexplicable crashes, and was beginning to wonder whether a too-rapid shutdown might be the cause of some of my problems. Has anyone tracked problems of this sort to over-rapid shutdowns with AMD Duron machines running WinMe, and, if so, do you know if there's a fix for it?
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06-07-2002, 05:29 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 117
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I've had the same problem with systems with AMD processors. It's far, far less likely to happen if you're using NTFS for the boot partition.
A safeguard is to run the registry backup utility every so often. Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup and choose Create an Emergency Repair Disk. Check the box that says, "Backup Registry" and run the utility. Your registry files will be backed up to WINNT\Repair\Regback. I usually rename that folder to today's date so I have multiple restore points.
Jeff
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06-07-2002, 05:45 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 134
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I don't have this problem because my XP box isn't fast enough! 96 MB of 66 MHz RAM (iPAQs have 102 MHz SDRAM and some have as much as 256 MB!) and a 4 gig ATA (pretty sure it's 33) HD is all ya need! 333 MHz all the way! I betcha that I'll get a 400 MHz Pocket PC before I fix my 1.2 GHz Athlon beast. Basically, Pocket PCs have pretty much totally eclipsed my current PC, and my PC is perfectly fine and runs the latest OS fine, as well.
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06-07-2002, 07:32 AM
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Oracle
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 864
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I have had this problem numerous times it is rediculous. Oh and not on just one machine.... several different machines!
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06-07-2002, 07:55 AM
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Sage
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 792
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Re: Is this only a problem on Win2000/XP?
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Hugh Nano
...Have upgraded the memory and the OS from Win98 to WinMe, but with little apparent success in shaking these inexplicable crashes, and was beginning to wonder whether a too-rapid shutdown might be the cause of some of my problems....
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WinMe is just trouble by itself. Almost every ME system I have worked on has had some quirk (though I rebuilt my parents machine with ME and it has been working fine...knock on wood). 2K and XP shut down differently then 9x series Windows. Have you ever just FFR'ed (FDisk, Format, Rebuilt) your system? Could be helpful to fix some of the problems that have been created along the way.
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