Corruption problem

[jlanka]

My server, starte experiencing corruption problems when I removed a PATA drive the other day.

I took the drive off to try it on another machine. When I booted back up, aplications started crashing, it had to check all the disks for consistency etc.

After living with it for a few days, it wouldn't boot any more with a bad ntldr or some such - doesn't much matter, the idea is al sorts of disk/file corruption.

I tried unplugging all the SATA and all but one of the PATA drives and re-installing but I still get corruption during the XP install, basically I can't even reconfig the machine.

I've got a feeling some component has gone bad but which one? I've seen this sort of thing before and it turned out to be a bad IDE cable believe it or not. I've reseated all the cables to no avail.
Could it be RAM? CPU? MOBO? I guess it could be any of those.

I don';t have much in the way of extra components to try swapping stuff out, unfortunately.. Thats my main problem.

Anyone seen this symptom recently, and have a clue as to where I should look first?

Thanks in advance for any help

jlanka

 

[o1die]

Maybe you just have a corrupt file system. By changing boards, xp tried and failed to initialize, so it lost some files. Switching it back just confused it more. A format and fresh install should fix it. Or, you can try windows safe mode, and remove all the devices in the device manager, and let windows try to reload devices again.

 

[jlanka]

Maybe you just have a corrupt file system. By changing boards, xp tried and failed to initialize, so it lost some files. Switching it back just confused it more. A format and fresh install should fix it. Or, you can try windows safe mode, and remove all the devices in the device manager, and let windows try to reload devices again.

Thanks for the suggestion - the drive I had removed wasn't the C drive, so it shouldn't have had any effect on the real C drive, but anyways

I got very lucky and stumbled across the problem. It turned out to be a bad 512MB stick of RAM. The manufacturer is TwinMOS - I'll be returning it for a new one today.

Whew!!! Glad I figured that one out. I pretty much figured it was some component