I might have a hard drive/memory problem on my new build.

[JustThisGuy]

So. I put together a new system, had everything running flawlessly. Five days later the system boots off when I'm rooting behind my workstation. I thought that I accidentally hit my power strip's reset button, so I turn the comp. back on and I get hit with this message:

"c:\windows\system32\config\system is deleted or corrupt. Please insert Windows disc and push R for repair."

Or something like that, anyway. I have all my important stuff backed up, so I just think, "to hell with this," and decide to reinstall Win XP. However, after loading the drivers, the program BSOD's me when it starts looking for previous windows installations. I get this message:

"Page fault in non-paged area... 0x00000050 etc. etc."

I google a solution, and find out that this generally means that the memory is bad, the drivers are bad, or that I might have a rootkit raising some ruckus behind the scenes. So I start swapping hardware; replaced the HD, swapped out memory, video card, cables, etc. Got the message every single time. So I begin to think it's my install disc, which is an nLite slipstreamed Win XP Pro with SP2 and drivers for SATA and the chipset. I try two backup copies of the slipstream disc to no avail. Finally, I put in an old Win XP Home disc on a lark and lo and behold! The disc doesn't BSOD. So I used the XP Home disc to delete my partitions, rebooted with the slipstreamed disc (no page fault error this time), and everything seemed to go fine. Things have been hunky dory for the past 48 hours or so.

I've ran chkdsk twice since then, and it doesn't turn up any errors. Haven't run memtest yet, but I will tonight. So my question is: bwahah?

Is my hardware bad, or was it the software? If it was the software, is there anything malicious enough out there that could actually block my windows re-install (but totally ignores an old 00' era original XP home disc)? If it was the hardware and it's not--as far as I can tell--the hard drive, video card, or the RAM (can't turn off processor cache in bios with my MB), what else could it have been? And if it is the hardware, wouldn't my ad hoc XP home solution not work in any case?

Any help that you fair folk can provide would be much appreciated. Here are the specs:

Intel e6550
Intel DG33FB
ADATA 2x2 DDR2 800 RAM
eVGA GeForce 8600 GT 512
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA II 250 gig HD 16 MB cache (the single-platter one)
Antec Earthwatts 500 watt PS
CoolerMaster Centurion 5 case

Everything is stock, no OC.

Cheers all.

 

[g-paw]

It's possible when you did the first reinstall you didn't do a full format. When you deleted the partitions and formatted you totally wiped out the old Windows installation.

 

[aadamszc]

Honestly, can't really say. However, if you have a friend or family with a computer, you might want to switch out your ram, etc. to test if it is actually the hardware.