Pushed it to far and Trashed OS Installation

pbs · May 5, 2002

Memory used to be OK to 500 so I thought I would try for a bit higher....

Booted at 130x4 (520) and started XP - Well sort of....
Couple of program error dialogues then rebooted....

Error messages that system files were corrupted or missing and said to boot from CD and Select Repair option..

So exactly what are you supposed to do when you get to the prompt in the windows directory? Not exactly the most helpful of recovery programs !!!

It's been a few months since the last OS re-install and I have made quite a lot of hardware changes so I gave ip trying to repair the install and just reformatted the partition and re-installed from scratch..

I think its time I made a backup set of CD's of the "clean" install since it can take quite a while to download all those OS upgrades.

batboy · May 5, 2002

Yep, this is not uncommon when you're doing overclocking. I have my entire harddrive ghosted over onto another harddrive for such occasions.

Fluxer · May 5, 2002

You probably could have easily fixed the corrupt Windows XP files. For some reason, Microsoft likes to confuse people and asks them to press "R" for repairs during the very beginning of the setup. This then takes you into DOS mode so you can repair files but in my opinion, its completely useless.

I had the same problem and I found that you have to load the Windows XP setup, hit enter to install, accept the agreement (you hit F8 or something) and then it will show a list of your currently installed Windows XP partitions. Highlight the damaged partition and press "R" to repair it. Don't be confused with the "R" that you are asked to press during the beginning of the setup, this is very different. After selecting "R", Windows XP will attempt to repair your current Windows XP partition automatically. I have had to do this about three times after getting corrupt files that didn't let me boot into windows, it worked every time.

Next time repair it instead of installing Windows XP again, if possible.

PressureCooker · May 5, 2002

The XP repair works for me about 4 out of 5 times. I always seem to be able to repair after pushing the CPU too far, but rarely can fix it after going too far with the memory. I also recommend Ghost... You can restore your system in about the same time it takes to go through the recovery process. - And it works every time!

pbs · May 5, 2002

Thanks very much for the information on the correct method to repair - why can't microsoft provide the same info.

I will make the backup set once i have my system the way I like it.

Thanks again :beer:

link26 · May 5, 2002

wow. that's weird.
I think I've gotten 2 errors so far. a corrupted ntfs.sys and a pci.sys, or something like that.

but when i press R, it boots right into windows..... :eh?:

pbs · May 5, 2002

Just recovered from a trashed OS again - twice in the same day !!!

Tried the solution suggested by AMD_BUILDER which has seemed to work - still a few little glitches though :-(

Windows XP used to be stable at 2400 but now keeps crashing ??

pbs · May 5, 2002

It looks like when you use the repair method that some parts of the OS can get a bit confused.

I was having big problems with OE complainid about some of its components. It appears that when you repair the previous install it replaces som components patched by windows update with the original (unpatched) ones.

Once I been to Windows Update and re-installed all the critical updates everything seems to be fine.

It took almost as long to use repair as it did to do a clean install - the only difference was that I didn't have to re-activate the install.

Can somebody please explain the pro's and con's of a repair as opposed to a clean install.

thanks,

Fluxer · May 5, 2002

Also, make sure you are running everything at default speeds before you run the repair. I'm not sure about the pro's and con's but I just use the repair because its much faster for me (depending on how many files are corrupt) and I don't lose any files.

pbs · May 5, 2002

Just Finished backing up the OS Partition with XP, All the latest Critical Updates and Drivers installed to 16 CD's - unfortunately the backup program does a CHS backup of the entire partition and not just the used ones - lets hope it works when I need it !!!

Thanks for all your help. :beer:

LarryJoe · May 6, 2002

pbs, I mentioned this in the other similar thread - try putting your XP drive on the intel ide 1 controller. You will not have this problem going forward. Don't get me wrong, I ghost from one drive to another all the time, but your partition, ntfs, XP corruption problems are exactly the same one's I was experiencing before I gave up on RAID 0, then I gave up on the hpt controller as the source of my boot drive. All is very stable now.

As far as hdd performance, a single drive on the intel controller vs the hpt controller perform similarly according to the benchmarks I have run.

pbs · May 6, 2002

Thanks Larry - I was thinking of going Raid - but at the moment that intel controller is where my HDD is connected.

At least things are back to normal after the re-format and the clean install - I tried the various repair options 3 times yesterday but still could not get stable operation. Today everything is fine.

A question on "Ghosted Drive"?

If you ghost a working install from one HDD to another should you leave the "backup" drive disconnected whilst experimenting with pushing the OC? otherwise isn't htere a possibility of trashing both?

LarryJoe · May 6, 2002

Hmmm....I guess it is a possibility, I never looked at it that way. I think the drive the OS is on is more likely to encounter negative effects of overclocking because this is the drive where XP will be writing system files to.

I have all my drives attached and have never had a storage drive get trashed from overclocking. One drive is for mp3's and pictures and the other drive back-ups the mp3's and pictures and strores my ghost image of the XP drive.

FYI - the destination for the image must be formatted in FAT or FAT32, an ntfs partition can not be written to with Ghost.

LJ

pbs · May 6, 2002

I currently use NTFS for all the partitions on my harddrive so If I understand what you are suggesting I would ghost an NTFS drive to a FAt or FAT32 Partition on the other drive?

I don't know if there is any preference for the type of filesystem that you should use when OCing? Anbody got any comments?

I was thinking of setting up a raid array using a pair of IBM drives but from some of the replies it looks like keeping the OS on a drive connected to the primary IDE controller is the best bet and install apps ( Mostly games) on the Raid array.

System is still nice and stable at the moment....

Glorious100 · May 6, 2002

I have read on the net that ibm is not a good harddisk in overclocked systems. You should be better of with maxtor or seagate.

LarryJoe · May 6, 2002

pbs - yes, that is correct, you will have to format one of those drives as fat32 to ghost the ntfs drive to it. It is no big deal and worth it. I imaged 3GB in about 5 minutes using full compression. Restoring is even faster.

Check it out now and you will see when you drop down the image to destination, you will only have your floppy and cdrw listed.

As far as my recomendation on keeping the boot drive on the intel ide 1 controller, your mileage may vary, but it works for me and I was going crazy getting corrupted drives and Windows for no apparent reason until I solved this. I was hot on getting a RAID 0 going when I built the machine, but you know what, I could not tell the difference in a RAID 0 vs. a straight ATA 100 drive. I bought the TH7II-RAID more for the ability to hook up 8 devices than a RAID array.

Hope this helps,

LJ

PressureCooker · May 6, 2002

And - you actually don't need a second drive. I have a FAT32 partition at the end of my drive (the slow part) that I use to dump a compressed partition image to. It works great

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