Can not load "system" (fixed but have ?)

[theharvester]

Hello all,
I have a Win2000 set up as a raid 1 with 2 500 gig drives. One day when I turned on the computer I got the error message "Yada Yad Yada can not load "software file" I replaced it with a backup and all was good. A couple days later I got the error "Yada Yada Yada can not load "system file". I tried all the recomendations on this site to no avail, ended up re-installing 2000. I think it was a bad drive and got corrupt. What I would like to know is How does one make sure the Hive files do not get too large? I read that all of them can not be larger that 16 Megs total so how do you keep them from getting too large. My system was only a few months old and had not installed all my software and such but when I checked the properties (booted with a test hard drive with the 500 gig slaved) and one of the files (systen I think) was like 14 megs. Is it possible that the bad spot on the drive(if that was the problem) made it larger for some reason.

 

[LWComputingMVP]

Where did you hear you had to keep it under 16 MB? My Software hive (in XP) is nearly 50 MB. XP and 2000 are not THAT different and I doubt that there is a 16 MB limit (I've never heard of one).

 

[theharvester]

When my computer would not start I did some searching to find the problem. I found a bunch of stuff on it. I just did a quick search on the Microsoft site and pasted a ssmall piece below. It is about server 2003 but talks about the 2000 memory limit.

From Microsoft website.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/302594/

SUMMARY
This article describes the System hive and the startup process.
MORE INFORMATION
Windows Server 2003 increases the amount of memory that is available when the computer starts. In Microsoft Windows 2000, 16 megabytes (MB) of memory are available during the startup process. In this 16 MB of memory, the following items must load: The System hive, the Page Frame Number (PFN) database, the Windows NT Loader (NTLDR), the kernel, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and the boot drivers. Typically, only the resources that are required to start up the computer can transfer information into the System hive.

 

[LWComputingMVP]

The Software hive doesn't have a limit - this is referring to the system hive. And I've never seen a system hive come close to that limit.