What makes system file corruption and needing a repair

[meganova]

i wonder what makes window boot fails and requires repair console. i have a taste of it rtwice in the past 2 weeks. Is it virus infection?

One was that after i put in a new HDD, windows told me it didnt boot and the pci.sys was corrupted or missing. The second time was when i surfed the internet the system froze. No BSOD or whatever, no Control alt del could help. when i rebooted from the switch the screen said (i cant remember the whole string) xxxsystemconfig was having problems.

I did the repair console on both and everything seems fine now. But the thing is when it asked me to choose the folder windows was in, it only listed d:windoows but mine was c:windows. i further checked and see the drive letters were reshuffled (C became D, E became F) before the repaire was done.

UPDATE : thanks for anyone helping

i finnally find out the root as so as it seems. i think it is the sata cable that somehow got damaged. i replaced a new one and see if it works. i have expeerienced similar stuff for IDE cables but not SATA. they are supposed to be sturdier aint they. so much for the construction.

 

[riser]

Scandisk and Defrag. A lot of system corruptions comes from having a page file too large or too small which results in it getting fragmented.

Offhand I think the page file should be 1.5 or 2.5 times the amount of memory in your computer.

512 = 765 to 1.5GB

 

[meganova]

would that make windows fail?

And i did run chkdsk afterward but it turned up nothing. I also swapped out the cable and up to now the ysstems okay

btw can anyone tell me which disk does this string "DeviceHarddisk2D" represent. i find it in windows error logs

 

[Codesmith]

Windows 9x seemed to randomly break itself for no apparent reason. But Windows XP should run very stable.

I manage to break my system from time to time, but only after I was messing with it in some way (updating 60 different apps at once, trying out new software, installing a game with Star Force Protection...).

My 2nd PC is on 24x7 and I pretty much only make changes when necessary and it has never needed repaired or reinstalled, as is the case with all the PCs I build for others.

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Virus and adware scans are advised, but if you haven't done so already you should also stress test your hardware.

Memtest86, Prime 95 (priority 10, large FFT's), Sandra Burn in Wizzard, extended diganostic test for the HD ...

Even if everything tests fine, its nice to know that your hardware is healthy and can handle anything you can throw at it.

 

[Zoron]

Quite often over time... if you have a lot of times where your computer freezes and you have to restart by resetting or powering off... bits of files still in RAM may not get written back to the hard drive.

Using the FAT file system, this can result in file corruption very easily... this is why Win 9x will do a scandisk on a bad shutdown. With NTFS, the same thing can result, but it's much more resilient and is not as easily damaged / corrupted.