Corruption! Need help ASAP!

[Motero]

I put together a computer for someone 2 years ago. It's been great until he just got hit with viruses. I reinstalled Win2k and have since been getting corruption errors after a period of time. I ran diags on the harddrive and it found bad sectors...I also read things about the motherboard having bad caps, and the Epox 8K7A I had in this PC had the start of some.

I replaced the systemboard with an IWILL KA266-R and moved everthing over. Same symptoms...it will run fine, then all of a sudden I would reboot and it says Something in the WINNT directory is corrupt. I run repair and it doesn't see the installation. I also replaced a harddrive with a reburb WD. Same symptoms. Still thought it could be the drive, so I bought another one...which turned out the company screwed me and sent me another refurb. I tried new cables, and removed everything. It's now just running with a different video card, ram in another slot, and harddrive hooked up. Any suggestions please? I was supposed to take this back to the guy tonight! Is it because I'm ghosting the drive from an older 2gb seagate? Something to do with the speeds or ghost maybe? Please help!

 

[amdskip]

It looks like you've ruled out things already and thats great. I would say your image that you are ghosting over is corrupt. Try a fresh install.

 

[Motero]

I'll try that...I delivered it last night, because I found something about a conflict with the ATI video card and the ALI chipset on the motherboard and installed a geforce 32 mb video card. Didn't have any problems after that...and then he called today. Ugh. I'm just really not liking these refurb harddrives. Not trusting them at all.

 

[Motero]

Could the ram or processor cause this? Since they are the only things I haven't replaced in the box. The ram is a crucial 256 mb pc2100 stick and the processor is an athlon 1.2ghz.

 

[amdskip]

Run memtest86 to see if the memory produces errors. Honestly processors either work or they don't IMHO for the most part.

 

[Motero]

memtest86? Where can I get that? I've been running Microscope diags on the the pc...hasn't found anything...

 

[amdskip]

http://www.memtest86.com/

 

[Motero]

The pc seems to work fine on the old drive that I loaded from scratch...it's just when i ghost it to another one...it can run for hours without problems...then to just boot it up some time, will give corruption...Some missing file in Winnt/System folder...I should be getting this tonight...so hopefully we'll find out the problem.

 

[Motero]

Is there any good programs for testing motherboards and processors out there?

 

[amdskip]

prime95 will stress a computer

I would really advise not using that image and instead just doing a fresh install with all windows updates.

 

[Motero]

Well I did a fresh install tonight...put on Win2k SP4...seems to be running OK..just gonna run some more tests and check some more stuff out. I also tried the memtest for the first time...how long does it take for results? is it only a single loop test?