Win98 Registry Problem, HW or SW problem!?

[braddds]

My win registry has blown a gasket! It preforms a scanreg on startup and immediately finds a problem, fixes it and reboots, then does the same thing again and again...you get the drift. I've tried to disable the auto scanreg feature but this doesn't help, in fact I'm now unable to even get into windows as the above problem continues to repeat. I've run scanreg in dos but same problem.

From readings into this problem I have found that the problem may be in the hardware, ie: ram, I/O or even in the BIOS. Not that I've given up on a software solution but I recently upgraded my BOIS (though no problems seemed to be present) and have bought new ram on two diffent occasions, all of this within the last month. So my question how do I determine if the problem is in the software and/or hardware. I know this is a tall order but would greatly appreciate any sage advice!

FYI
OS win98se
MB abit bh6
CPU slot 1 PIII 500
ram (3x) 128MB SDRAM PC133 Micron
VID Voodoo3 2000 AGP
HD IBM Deskstar 20GB ATA66
AOC Promise ATA66 Controller PCI
SC SB XGamer

Hope this helps.

thx
braddds

 

[spacekowboy]

can you put the ram back to what it was before the problem and try it?

will it boot to safe mode?

you can remove cdrom, sound card, etc from the motherboard and see if it does the same, or when it stops-that device wld then be the issue...

id guess ram or software, but ive never seen the exact thing happen before...

#-)

 

[braddds]

thx spacekowboy

I read something similar to this off of google! I'll will give this a try...I will keep u posted on the success or failure of this proceedure!

 

[hotfusion]

An un-educated quess, this, but it sounds like your registry is corrupt, as are Scanreg's backups, the system is detecting dodgy registry and re-instating a previous (also dodgy) backup,and so the cycle continues. Can you get to MS DOS? If so, key scanreg/restore and pick the earliest dated backup listed. Andy.

 

[gamblers]

This is an un-educated guess also I haven't ever ran into a problem like this, but could you hit like the X key on your keyboard when it is loading, because that will usually allow you to skip past that and allow it to start loading windows. Hopefully this works. Good Luck!!

 

[tkbigbear]

Your registry is corrupt.you can either C:/scanreg/restore which will restore the registry to a previous time when it was correct or C:/scanreg/fix which will fix the problem with the registry.

 

[braddds]

Thanks all for your help!

It would appear that those who identified it as a dodgy/corrupt registry are the winners! However, I fixed the problem with a recent ghost image (darn fine program)and restored the entire windows OS partition. I keep my OS on a different partition than my files, programs and games. thanks to "spacekowboy" I followed your instructions - even though it wasn't the problem it was time to do a spring clean on the ol' system anyways!

Great advice all

thx
braddds