MBR Hosed?

[skyeclad]

OK, here are the symptoms. About 1 mo. ago I installed an additional gig of ram to bring me up to 4x512mb. For 1 month, no problems. Then for a week I started noticing that my computer was always locking up after being inactive for hours, forcing me to re-boot when I return to the PC.

After re-booting consecutively for 5 days or so, the problem went away for a day or two and then it was locked up again at a BSOD Machine Check Exception. However, this time when I rebooted I got an "Error Loading OS" message which means my MBR is hosed.

Here's what I can do. I can boot up using a CD ROM disk that allows me to boot the master HDD. I cannot however, boot using my old RAM stock speeds, 400mhz, 2.5,3,3,7 2T. This causes an immediate lock-up or reboot. My auto detection dropped me to 2.5,3,3,6 2T which runs stable enough but gives me Memtest errors just the same.

I tried recovering the MBR in XP recovery console(fixmbr) but this program doesn't work. Fixboot doesn't work either.

My guess as to what's happening is that I have a bad Mem chip and all the crashing somehow hosed my MBR. Once I'm able to boot the HDD normally, I will test to find the bad chip but I want reliable boot-ups first. Any suggestions?

 

[skyeclad]

Update: I pulled out the two newest 512MB chips and the computer was able to boot to the OS. Thinking I found my problem, I memtested the old chips and discovered that one chip had errors. I then tested the new chips and they did not have errors. Wierd, because pulling the two new chips allowed the HDD to boot which I don't see the connection. Unfortunately, this only worked a couple of times so I'm still having boot issues and I find that when this is happening the only way to boot to Windows is to restart about 10 times. Why repeating this action over and over eventually works, I don't know.

Anyhow, I've been memtesting the new chips overnight and through today so I believe that I'll be memory chip error free. This should allow me to diagnose this HDD problem. Any ideas?