I recently replaced my old motherboard and got a new one, thinking this was the cause of my hard drive corrupting itself. In fact this wasnt.

I have replaced both the motherboard and the hard drive, and to no avail they still dont work.

The hard drive is 250 gigs, and when i keep a smaller 40 gig in the same configuration, nothing happens. I in fact kept it in this configuration for 6 months with no corruption at all.

Windows will boot up a little, and then gives me this error:

\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEMced is corrupted, so on and so forth.

I doubt it is the ram, psu, processor or any other components because everything performs perfectly fine on the 40 gig.

Is there any way to stop it from doing this? Or will i have to have a happy medium by booting the 40 and making the 250 a slave.

Please give me some help, this is beyond frustrating.

Update: I fixed the damaged files and now windows will fully load but will blue screen and restart as soon as it treis to go into the actual os.

My full system specs are:

Athlon xp 3000+
1 gb generic pc 3200
Sapphire Radeon x800 pro
Asus a7n8x-E Deuluxe mobo
Generic 350w psu
LG cd burner.
250gb Maxtor 7200rpm hd.

I think its either the motherboard or the hard drive. How could it be any of the other components if for the 6 months i ran a 40 gig hard drive there was no failure. This is so incredibly confusing and frustrating that this computer cannot be fixed.

Have you tried a clean install of Windows, i.e., format the dirve or partition and then install Windows.

Yes, eveyrtime i reinstlal windows i change the size of the partitions and then format with ntfs and then install windows. Every single time i do that.

I would do the following if I ran into this problem. Run chkdsk /f through the command prompt to check your hard drive for errors. Clear the CMOS, instructions should be in the motherboard manual. Then go into your BIOS and reset to what ever the default is, chances are that clearing the CMOS will have done this. Make sure you have the newest BIOS for your board. If you haven't done so, try to boot into safe mode with the Network Work Connection and if you can access the Internet make sure you have all the Windows updates, not sure if they'll install in Safe Mode but I'd try. For 2000 you pretty much have to have SP4 and IE 6, both of which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Web Site copied to a CD and installed. If you can get into safe mode, I'd delete all the drivers through Add/Remove programs and through Devise Manager. Make sure all drivers are up do date. I'd Google the problem as well as search Microsoft support. Finally, if you have a 3rd hard drive, I wouldn't use the working 40GB, I'd put it into the machine and try installing 2000, it's always possible that the 2000 installation disk is corrupt. Understand this is all hit or miss, I've just found overtime that these things often will resolve this kind of problem. I think the above would be worth a try.

Yeah ive done all that you reccommended, but to no avail the 250 keeps corrupting. The 40 gig just has something about it that makes it safe, but 250 must just be too much for the computer to handle.

Right now im testing to see if its the cpu, I have an old 850 Duron in my pc.

Afraid I'm out of ideas, hope you figure it out.

Heres my idea tell me what you think. Since i RMA'd my motherboard and hard drive, and got two completely new ones im gonna try to see if its any other parts. Right now im testing the cpu, if it fails im gonna swap in different ram, and then once that fails a new video card. If it continues to fail, i have no idea of whats going on.

Oh, and do you think the PSU has anything to do with this?

Sounds like this is all you can do. Have you tried the drive in a different computer? Don't remember if you said you had. If it doesn't work in a different computer, you know it's the hard drive, if it does work, you know it's somethiing in the other one.

The 250gig should be pristine. I RMA'd it and when i recieved it the label said it was manufactured like 2 days earlier. Thats a good suggestion, ill try it out.

Let us know how it works

Is it a Maxtor drive with a Nvidia motherbhoard?


http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2685

Sorry, I paged past your post with your system specs.

You're chipset is Nforce2, and the Maxtor problems seem to just affect 3 & 4. I still would contact Maxtor to see if the problem is on their end.

I would also think about a new power supply. I doubt it's the problem in this case, but generic ones never seem to perform to specs under reasonable room temperatures.

Oh i guess i should let you know this. The problem was persistent on my motherboard before an a7v600-x. This started happening when i opened the case to blow out the dust.

If you have access to another computer, I would try switching the power supply, or switching your graphics card - A generic 350w seems underpowered for a system with a x800. It's possible that the 250 drives pulls just enough extra that your power supply can't handle it.

I'm assuming it's a PATA drive - If it's SATA, make sure you have an updated 2000 driver - not just the XP driver (Both use NTFS, but differ slightly.)

Also, check your master/slave jumpers. Some chipsets can't do cable select properly, and some drives need a different jumper setting when used alone.

Otherwise, you may have a bad drive, or it's just Maxtor. When I started building my media server, which is a socket 754, I started with 4 Maxtor 200G drives (Have a total of 12 drives now, assorted makes). Within 6 months, I lost 3 of the Maxtors (Data corruption and total drive failures). I replaced the fourth with a Western Digital. Haven't lost a single drive (WD, Seagate, Samsung) since.
Interestingly, in order to salvage the data on the Maxtors, I just plugged them into one of my intel (socket 478) systems. Scandisk caught and fixed the corruption which it wouldn't even detect on my AMD system. Even the drives that totally failed on my AMD system, I was able to salvage on Intel.

In short, I no longer buy Maxtor (which was recently purchased by Seagate, but I think Seagate plans on just manufacturing its own drives and get rid of the low end Maxtor, I hope.)