Yes, I know that the title is not very informative, but I am at the crazy/frustrated stage at this point. I just don't know what to think or what to do.
I guess I will start with symptoms, and refer to the fact that this started happening after I restored an old registry. I think the registry was 6 months old. I restored it because I was trying to do the free virus scan on symantic's webpage, and it kept telling me that I didn't have active X/scripting enabled...when I did. So, I figured restoring the registry might fix the problem.
My first problem occurred while re-installing service pack 6.1 for IE. When I rebooted I got an error message at boot telling me that "windows could not update the file"...and then there was a huge blank space with nothing there, but it booted on to windows and everything seemed fine.
This past week, here is an abbreviated list of what I have encountered. I have gotten error messages that "VXD.dll is corrupted", "General Failure reading Drive C", "Himem.sys is missing or corrupted", "Emm386 is missing or corrupted", "Scandisk encountered a data error while reading the FAT on drive C" These errors come at boot and seem to be completely random. I booted up yesterday and my boot record was missing. Luckily I had the ultimate boot disk and restored it.
But today something else started happening...at boot it showed the drive as garbage characters and beeped twice. I got to safe mode and it told me that my registry was corrupted, but I ran scanreg and it said it was fine. So I rebooted and got "VMM.vxd is corrupted" you will have to run Windows setup again. So I rebooted again, I ran fixreg and I was able to boot into windows finally. I also had to restore the master boot record.
So, my question is this. Does this point to a bad hard drive or just a really screwed up registry? The kicker is that right before all this happened and after I had restored the previous registry, I ran scandisk and defrag and no errors were found at all...then all this starts happening.
If it's the registry what is with the screwed up symbols for the hard drive, and sometimes it doesn't detect the hard drive's size.
I have a lot of stuff on this drive. If it's a bad drive then I have no problem with "hopefully getting it to boot" and cloning it. But if it's a screwed up registry, buying a new drive is a waste of time.
It took me over an hour to get my drive to boot today. I kept getting "general failure reading drive C". Also, the drive would randomly come up as gibberish at boot.
What do you guys think? I'm just trying to figure out what to do. I have my A+ and everything, but the behavior of this is just making me feel dumb. I just don't know how to proceed.
One other thing...this is a WD 120 gig drive and I was able to successfully run the diagnostic software that came with it, and it said the drive was fine. I just don't know what else to do.
Thank You
1mt
I guess I will start with symptoms, and refer to the fact that this started happening after I restored an old registry. I think the registry was 6 months old. I restored it because I was trying to do the free virus scan on symantic's webpage, and it kept telling me that I didn't have active X/scripting enabled...when I did. So, I figured restoring the registry might fix the problem.
My first problem occurred while re-installing service pack 6.1 for IE. When I rebooted I got an error message at boot telling me that "windows could not update the file"...and then there was a huge blank space with nothing there, but it booted on to windows and everything seemed fine.
This past week, here is an abbreviated list of what I have encountered. I have gotten error messages that "VXD.dll is corrupted", "General Failure reading Drive C", "Himem.sys is missing or corrupted", "Emm386 is missing or corrupted", "Scandisk encountered a data error while reading the FAT on drive C" These errors come at boot and seem to be completely random. I booted up yesterday and my boot record was missing. Luckily I had the ultimate boot disk and restored it.
But today something else started happening...at boot it showed the drive as garbage characters and beeped twice. I got to safe mode and it told me that my registry was corrupted, but I ran scanreg and it said it was fine. So I rebooted and got "VMM.vxd is corrupted" you will have to run Windows setup again. So I rebooted again, I ran fixreg and I was able to boot into windows finally. I also had to restore the master boot record.
So, my question is this. Does this point to a bad hard drive or just a really screwed up registry? The kicker is that right before all this happened and after I had restored the previous registry, I ran scandisk and defrag and no errors were found at all...then all this starts happening.
If it's the registry what is with the screwed up symbols for the hard drive, and sometimes it doesn't detect the hard drive's size.
I have a lot of stuff on this drive. If it's a bad drive then I have no problem with "hopefully getting it to boot" and cloning it. But if it's a screwed up registry, buying a new drive is a waste of time.
It took me over an hour to get my drive to boot today. I kept getting "general failure reading drive C". Also, the drive would randomly come up as gibberish at boot.
What do you guys think? I'm just trying to figure out what to do. I have my A+ and everything, but the behavior of this is just making me feel dumb. I just don't know how to proceed.
One other thing...this is a WD 120 gig drive and I was able to successfully run the diagnostic software that came with it, and it said the drive was fine. I just don't know what else to do.
Thank You
1mt