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alis14
04-26-2004, 03:55 PM
Hi all,
A few days ago my system descided it would be fun to corrupt its own registry and make it unreadble. This occured on start up after a normal shut down. Therefore I restored an old registry as recommended which was unfortunatly about 1year out of date leading to the computer thinking alot of programs are installed that arnt and ones that are arnt noticed.

As this also included my anti-virus not installing as it was already installed but not unistalling as "this facility can only be used on an installed product" (DOH!!!) I descided to do a complete reformat (I have done several before on various machines including this one)and as I couldnt be bothered to sit for hours in front of the computer fine tuning the registry.

Unfortunatly this is where I stumbled upon my second problem. When I tryed to reformat it got as far as checking bad clusters and then ran out of memory with an error message (which I can not remember exactly atm but I will add later) stating that it had run out of memory and recommended I ran scan disk, so when I tryed to do that, guess what, Not enough memory!!

Therefore I need help in determining, is this a HD problem or a RAM problem or other? I beleive its worth replacing the HD if neccasary however before I do I would like to make sure this is the cause. It does seem strangly coincidental that the registry be lost then at the same time the RAM fail?
Any thoughts/help would be gratly appreciated
Regards
Alis14
Alistair

TheFlightMan
04-28-2004, 11:30 AM
Alis14,

If you are finding bad sectors on a hard drive, it is safe to say that you will need to replace it. I would not perform any repairs in order to salvage it, sooner or later, the drive will eventually fail. Bad sectors is the beginning of the end when it comes to hard drives. Make sure you check the warranty on your drive, most drives nowadays come with a 3 or 5 year warranty. It takes a simple phone call to the manufacturer and in about 7 to 10 working days you should have your replacement.

TheFlightMan

MadMaster
04-28-2004, 09:09 PM
It is probably your HD going out.

Out of curiosity, how much ram are you running and what kind of system do you have (motherboard, processor, etc).

Also, how are you formatting the HD? Are you doing a "low level" format?

There are a lot of unknowns but chances are it is your HD going out on you.

alis14
04-29-2004, 04:54 PM
Okay, kinda fixed it. As you said it probably is my HD failing as its about 4yrs old so never mind about the warrenty. lol.
In the end I did a format using A Norton Rescue disk of some kind, seems to be holding atm but im looking for a new HD while keeping my data backed up on my server.
So all is well(ish) again
Thanks all
Alis14

MadMaster
04-29-2004, 09:09 PM
Glad you found a fix!