Persistant System Registry errors on cold-boot

[zootweller]

Hi

Since performing a complete upgrade to accomodate a GeForce4 MX440, my PC has been giving me the most problems I have ever witnessed in my 10yrs building these things.
The most common is cold-booting, get error: Registry is corrupt, you have restored a good registry, please restart'.
On several occasions in last month it has looped this error, or let me in to give a win98se error saying registry will have to be recovered and to reboot, then it refuses to boot.... I must state that I have swaped to my old vid-card (S3 Savage 4), replaced the memory, updated the bios & mboard drivers, replaced my DVD & new HD, re-installed my Realtek NIC drivers (I know there are issues with these cards & the default win98se drivers, but the card always worked fine previously), swapped my 300watt PSU & mboard, and it STILL happens!!! When the PC does boot, it works great (I finished Jedi2 in no-time), but it only boots 1 out of 3 times, eventually giving me the error as above, hence reformat & reinstall (Symantec Ghost2002 - thank you!!).

Please tell me I'm not alone with this?!!!

Kit:
AMD Athlon XP 1600+, QDI K7V8366 Kudos7v2 M/Board, 2*256MB PC2100 DDR, Inno3D Tornado GeForce4 MX440, Realtek RTL8029 PCI Ethernet NIC, onboard audio (soundblaster).
Running Win98SE

Any help would be mega-appreciated, sorry about the long text, but should save too many re:'s.

 

[edfair]

You're not alone, although I don't have a feel for how many have the problem.
The problem isn't the registry. I've killed backups and forced the system to use one and one only registry and had the problem come and go. One boot would be good, the next bad.
What did seem to help was a clean reload of the system, all the way back to fdisk.
Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Scotsdude]

The only thing in that lot that would give me cause for concern is the fact that you have 512Mb of RAM, and Win98 has a known prob with anything over 384Mb.....although somehow I don't think that is the problem here.....

Scotsdude
If you think I'm talking bull, tell me!!!!

 

[FatesWebb]

I would run windows setup, and if that doesnt fix it thanI would FORMAT and run windows setup. js error; 67 on line; 36 of signature.class

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Interesting - I've been seeing this since installing a GeForce 4 board in my system. I also have 512Mb RAM, but am running Windows ME (actually triple-booting ME/W2k/Linux). Since it's intermittent, it's hard to track down - but I'll keep an eye out for a definitive solution. Rebuilding from scratch does not always do the trick!

Good Luck! CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[walshy]

have you tried disabling the cpu internal cache and then the exteranl cache in the bios (under the advanced bios features) you may find a fault on the motherboard cache or the cpu cache? It is worth a try.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

It's stopped happening now. There's no fault on the motherboard - I had it professionally tested (a second opinion ;-)), and no fault was found.

I swapped the cards around (I have a SBLive! Plat, a WinTV and a 3Com NIC), and everything settled down like magic!

My method was to remove all devices in Device Manager, and replace the cards one at a time, ensuring that the SoundCard and NIC did not share resources with the on-board Highpoint RAID controller. This was a tip I got from Paul's unofficial KG7 page - but I'd imagine it would cure all sorts of evils on other boards.

The reason it works is because the HP controller shares reources with one of the PCI slots, and other M/B resources share with other PCIs. While this should work in theory (and does, under Windows 2000/XP), Plug and Pray is fairly rudimentary under Windows 9.x/ME, and Sound/Hdd/NICs/modems don't mix well.

I hope this helps someone else CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[dinosnake]

Yeah, the problem is during the intialization of the PnP interfaces. It is a driver Resource Sharing conflict.

A tip - if it happens to you (or again) hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and shut down the Registry Checker. Believe it or not, ignore it once and many times it will never report it again, as Windows will properly write the hardware configuration into the Registry for the next bootup. The Registry Checker sometimes yells Wolf.