OS safe after memory swap

[zellett]

So, I've had a bunch of problems with BSOD's over the last few months on my Dell laptop. I think I've narrowed it down to the hard drive or the RAM. It fails memtest86 terribly, so I know I need new RAM.

Is it possible this has in any way damaged the hard drive? Its been several months that I've had this problem and it got progressively worse. I'm going to run some tests on the HD as well, just to see. Assuming I replace the RAM and the HD checks out, should I reinstall windows?

Iv'e gotten many registry errors, boot failures, and countless BSOD's. I guess my question is, is it safe to assume all of these were due to the bad RAM? I don't want to leave something unturned and have it bite me in the ass later.

Thanks

 

[shadowthor]

If it fails memtest, ram definitely needs to be replaced. The OS is corrupted, because of countless BSODs.

 

[zellett]

Thanks.

I actually just finished testing the hard drive and it was fine. Then I ran memtest on each module and only one was bad. The other finished two passes with no errors. I tried booting with just the one and it wasn't pretty. A dozen or so processes failed to load, and half my programs were missing. I haven't checked on my files yet, but I didn't have that many on there anyway.

Its kinda strange how quickly this degraded. It was a nuissance for months, but it still worked. I finally used the Dell Recovery Partition two days ago and it seemed to be fine, except for all the crap-ware (68 processes!!!!!!).

I ordered 2GB of memory from crucial just now, so I'll see if I can get it working properly again. I sure hope that partition is not damaged, else I'm screwed cuz I don't have the reinstallation disk.

 

[dokk2]

just a little note here,,if you can,,get a windoze ME bootdisk floppy and create an autoexec.bat with a pointer to scandisk,or just run it manually from the dos prompt,otherwise if you let windoze do it ,there will be almost no chance of recovery,also you might consider getting rid of crap-o-dell ware and installing a clean verision of your os..........:>)