Sudden death syndrome?

Theophylact · February 9th, 2007, 09:09 PM

Suddenly, my Windows box has begun refusing to boot. Or rather, if I boot WinXP normally, it freezes partway through, and if I boot via safe mode, it gets to (..../system32/iosys) and then reboots. I can't get in at all. (This post is coming from my SuSE machine.)

I just put in a new Seagate Barracuda 250 GB, but that's not it, because disconnecting the new drive has no effect.

My system is an AMD 2500+, an ASUS A7NX8, and 1.5 GB of DDR400. It's been working fine for at least a year, though I just lost the D drive (a Maxtor 120) a week ago, which is why I put in the Seagate.

Any suggestions?

Atomic Rooster · February 9th, 2007, 09:24 PM

I'm thinking either a power supply or memory problem. You could test the memory with Memtest86+. How old is the PSU? If you have another, try swapping it out.

Seems odd that your OS would become corrupted somehow. You could always try a repair too.

Don't mind me. I'm just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

.

Theophylact · February 9th, 2007, 09:33 PM

Well, the PSU is an Antec that came with the Sonata case. It's a pretty reliable one; at least 350W of decent power, and I'm using stock cooling and running at spec. The RAM is Mushkin DDR400, three sticks of 512K.

Theophylact · February 9th, 2007, 09:40 PM

I should have said ".../iomdisk.sys". But I'm not sure that makes a difference...

Atomic Rooster · February 9th, 2007, 09:54 PM

Hmm . . .

How about booting to the XP CD, going into the recovery console, and running chkdsk.

**Martoch** · February 9th, 2007, 10:01 PM

What first comes to mind for me is performing a Windows repair as it will replace the system files without overwriting your personal data or applications. It could be a hardware issue, but I'd start with a simple repair.

Here's a link to perform a repair just in case you need it.

Chkdsk via the recovery console also came to mind...maybe with the /r switch (although I'm not sure if that parameter is available in recovery console)

Mickwish · February 9th, 2007, 10:13 PM

Sounds to me like it has corrupted the windows swap file or something.

I would try a repair as AR and Mike suggested, and if that doesn't work it would like like a clean install is needed.

It could also be a hardware issue that caused the corruption, though, so I'd also do a memtest and scandisk or use one of the hard drive manufacturer utilities to check the main drive.

You didn't have a swap file on the old drive that failed, did you?

Cheers
Mick

Rootstonian · February 10th, 2007, 08:55 AM

If this is a 24x7 machine and you had it down for a while, I would pull and reset the cards and memory.

I've actually had a couple of fixes like that; the contact points on the cards will shrink a tad and a dust particle or 2 gets in there when you start stirring things up.

May not be your problem; just something I like to do on a full-time box when it gets shut down for a while.

Theophylact · February 10th, 2007, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mickwish

Sounds to me like it has corrupted the windows swap file or something.

I would try a repair as AR and Mike suggested, and if that doesn't work it would like like a clean install is needed.

It could also be a hardware issue that caused the corruption, though, so I'd also do a memtest and scandisk or use one of the hard drive manufacturer utilities to check the main drive.

You didn't have a swap file on the old drive that failed, did you?

Cheers
Mick

Actually, I don't know whether I had a swap file. I never specifically configured one, but I did a pretty standard clean installation of XP Home on that machine, so if that's part of the setup it would have been there, and if not, not. The old failed D drive was the original XP boot drive in an earlier machine, repurposed as a slave to access its files when I first installed the new machine, and I never deliberately used it for a swap file. But I occasionally would get messages about a delayed write failure to that drive, so clearly it was being accessed when I didn't know about it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rootstonian

If this is a 24x7 machine and you had it down for a while, I would pull and reset the cards and memory.

Theophylact · February 10th, 2007, 10:38 AM

f I do a clean install, though, I'll do it on the new drive; I've got too much stuff on the old drive to lose. I had just bought a USB2 external drive to back it up to, but it came set up with FAT32 and I hadn't yet converted it to NTFS.

If I can boot to Ubuntu Live, can I use that to copy stuff from the old drive to the external?