XP cannot start. Windows\Drivers\PCI.SYS corrupt or cannot be found

[Dynamo99]

I'm working on a system (p4-1.6Gb NTFS) and after doing a Norton Liveupdate and rebooting, the system came back saying it could not start because PCI.SYS could not be found ot was corrupted.. I tried everything I know (not much ) to "repair" this.. (chkdsk etc. )I even expanded a new pci.sys from the cd, no luck. I tried restoring the registry as well with no luck. Eventually removed the harddrive, and installed it as a secondary on another machine.. saved what files I needed to save, then did a format/reinstall of XP Home. Of course, everything works fine now, till the next time.. but I think MS had better do something to fix this "fatal" error pronto, but I guess it's unlikely as I understand that these types of errors have been around since W2K, especially the "windows\system32\system" corrupted error. This is the second system I have had to do a complete reinstall on, and the people are not too happy.. especially one person I know who lost hundreds of her digital photos by trying to fix it herself.. Has anyone else seen this pci.sys error and recovered from it??

 

[linney]

Checked the Knowledge Base for PCI.SYS and all I can find is an listing about Debugging PCI see Q314743. I did find out what it stands for....."Peripheral Component Interconnect"....None the wiser though. There were a few hits under Google (Web and Groups) Search, nothing conclusive though.

 

[svaverka]

Hi, I got the same error on a Celeron 433 mhz system. The machine worked great until I decided to increase the RAM size. Working with 96 mb was ok but as soon as I put a 128 mb stick og RAM in, I got PCI.sys is correpted or missing. I then went back to thew 96 mb and all was ok. I tried this a couple of times with the same result. Am I going crazy - what does pci.sys have to do with RAM?
Cheers

svaverka

 

[linney]

Sounds like corrupt or mismatched memory stick. See if there is any help here.


319136 - "Pci.sys Is Missing or Corrupt" Error Message When You Start Windows

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319136&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

http://groups.google.com/groups?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=pci.sys+ram+windows+xp

http://www.memtest86.com/

Memtest86 - A Stand-alone Memory Diagnostic.

 

[Ferrit]

Hi there,


I had this problem when upgrading from 128MB memory to 640.
(adding two 256MB sticks)

I added the 2 256MB sticks and got this on bootup. The problem was solved by swapping the sticks so that the largest one (256MB) was in DIMM1, 256 in DIMM2 and the 128 in DIMM3. I.e. In descending order. Some motherboards don't like the smaller memory first even though there is no mention of this in the manual! (My board was an Abit BF6)

Good luck,


Chris

Bigamy is having one wife too many.
Marraige is the same.
-Oscar Wilde