Thursday, June 6, 2002
A bug bite that stings
Posted by Jason Dunn in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 02:37 PM
http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/lev2/67/lev3/70/pid/779/qid/101860
This has nothing to do with our Pocket PCs, but I think this is important enough to pass on to you. Have you ever booted up your Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer only to be presented with a message that says something about the "windows\ system32 \config \system" directory? It might say the HIVE file is corrupt, the registry is corrupt, or that your system.log file in the /software directory is corrupt. There are around six variations on this error, but they all result in the same thing: a completely dead OS that is very difficult to recover from. Searching the Microsoft Knowledgebase at the time, I discovered nothing of any help. A complete reinstall seemed to be the only choice.
Last year I was installing Windows 2000 onto several brand new computers for my church. Two of the four computers received this error - I wasn't sure what to make of it. All the machines were ASUS A7V mobos, Duron CPUs, and ATA-100 hard drives. Over the next six months, two more of the machines had the same problem. I suspected flaky ATA-100 hardware or drivers. Fast forward to today - my own XP machine (also an ASUS A7V) died with the same error two weeks ago. This was the third time I'd seen this problem on my rig - twice with 2000, once with XP. What was going on?
I decided to research the problem more thoroughly than last time, and on the site linked above I found hundreds and hundreds of people who had the same problem. They all had different motherboards, RAM, CPUs - the only commonality was Windows 2000 or XP (and newer hardware, typically fast ATA-100 hard drives). The theory that makes the most sense is this: Windows 2000/XP have accelerated shutdown routines, and they shut down the machine before the registry is finished being written to. Sometimes this causes the registry to mis-report its file size, and on the next boot the OS will report it as being corrupt. The same thing can happen to other critical system files. The fix is to get into the recovery console and copy the backups over, but when I did this I ended up with a blank profile in XP and the computer asking me to reinstall every piece of hardware over again - it was easier for me to restore a backup from two weeks earlier.
I'm not normally one to believe in conspiracies, but I believe Microsoft has known about this problem for over a year and they've done nothing about it. Someone re-published a KB article that seemed to address the problem, but it doesn't exist on the live site anymore. The only way to prevent this (hopefully) is to reboot your machine instead of powering it down, and when it reboots to the BIOS screen, punch the power button. Every other solution I've seen seems to be only partially successful (slowing down RAM speed, etc.). I could be completely wrong on this, but I've seen this problem enough times to know how serious it is - and I wanted to warn you all about it.
This has nothing to do with our Pocket PCs, but I think this is important enough to pass on to you. Have you ever booted up your Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer only to be presented with a message that says something about the "windows\ system32 \config \system" directory? It might say the HIVE file is corrupt, the registry is corrupt, or that your system.log file in the /software directory is corrupt. There are around six variations on this error, but they all result in the same thing: a completely dead OS that is very difficult to recover from. Searching the Microsoft Knowledgebase at the time, I discovered nothing of any help. A complete reinstall seemed to be the only choice.
Last year I was installing Windows 2000 onto several brand new computers for my church. Two of the four computers received this error - I wasn't sure what to make of it. All the machines were ASUS A7V mobos, Duron CPUs, and ATA-100 hard drives. Over the next six months, two more of the machines had the same problem. I suspected flaky ATA-100 hardware or drivers. Fast forward to today - my own XP machine (also an ASUS A7V) died with the same error two weeks ago. This was the third time I'd seen this problem on my rig - twice with 2000, once with XP. What was going on?
I decided to research the problem more thoroughly than last time, and on the site linked above I found hundreds and hundreds of people who had the same problem. They all had different motherboards, RAM, CPUs - the only commonality was Windows 2000 or XP (and newer hardware, typically fast ATA-100 hard drives). The theory that makes the most sense is this: Windows 2000/XP have accelerated shutdown routines, and they shut down the machine before the registry is finished being written to. Sometimes this causes the registry to mis-report its file size, and on the next boot the OS will report it as being corrupt. The same thing can happen to other critical system files. The fix is to get into the recovery console and copy the backups over, but when I did this I ended up with a blank profile in XP and the computer asking me to reinstall every piece of hardware over again - it was easier for me to restore a backup from two weeks earlier.
I'm not normally one to believe in conspiracies, but I believe Microsoft has known about this problem for over a year and they've done nothing about it. Someone re-published a KB article that seemed to address the problem, but it doesn't exist on the live site anymore. The only way to prevent this (hopefully) is to reboot your machine instead of powering it down, and when it reboots to the BIOS screen, punch the power button. Every other solution I've seen seems to be only partially successful (slowing down RAM speed, etc.). I could be completely wrong on this, but I've seen this problem enough times to know how serious it is - and I wanted to warn you all about it.
