OK, how screwed am I?

[Viper GTS]

I clocked my Celeron II 566 to 978, & booted all the way into W98. I restarted it from the Start button, & clocked it to 1003. Got a protection error. Rebooted, now Windows won't start. I get a registry error every time I boot. The file checker comes up & says it's successfully restored a good registry, & that I need to restart. Each time I restart, it does the same thing. Won't boot into safe mode or normal mode. Dunno yet about command prompt. Right now I'm posting from my Linux drive.

Any ideas on how to rescue my ass? In theory I can use Linux to access the 98 drive, though it'll be a pain. Even if I could just back my stuff up, that'd be cool.

Viper GTS

 

[BenSkywalker]

Stupid question, just trying to get a full picture

Have you reset you Celery to default clock yet?

Any luck with command prompt?

How is your drive partitioned?

Have you tried pulling DIMMs out one by one and booting with your Celery at default?

 

[Viper GTS]

The comp itself works fine. I'm running Linux on it right now with the Celeron at 952, which is it's normal speed. I have two drives, in removable bays. One with Mandrake 7.0, one with 98 SE. Each 10.2 GB drive is a single partition, with the 98 drive obviously being FAT32.

I haven't yet tried the command prompt, but I will once I have a general idea where I'm headed to fix this mess.

Viper GTS

 

[Pariah]

In order to get your system that high, you must have really jacked up your system bus. The error messages you are getting basically tell you, you either severely corrupted windows system files, or you corrupted your whole hard drive. Either way, you'll probably have to format at least your windows folder and reinstall.

 

[Viper GTS]

The bus speed never went above 118 MHz, & I run it normally at 112 (112x8.5 = 952).

Viper GTS

 

[Pariah]

118 is high enough to corrupt some models of hard drives.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Have you attempted to set it back to default, just to eliminate it from the realm of possibilities? I can boot directly to be at 109MHZ FSB(K7M) and run it all day without a problem but Windows is lucky to make it to the splash screen @108MHZ.

Did you try to reboot more then five times while getting the registry error? If you did, you may not have a registry that can be utilized(have you previously adjusted the amount of backups?).

Have you attempted to boot from your SYA disk? I'd attempt SYA if you haven't, then command prompt to see if you have the files there to save, then possibly reinstalling Windows over your current install for simpler backup before FDISK and Format.

When ScanDisk runs, what errors are you getting and have you checked the log to see if it has been renaming multiple files?

 

[Viper GTS]

PCI bus was only at 39 MHz, I'm pretty sure I had it set to 1/3. If not, it would have been at 1/4, which would only be 29.5 (under spec).

Viper GTS

 

[Viper GTS]

I'll go try it at 566...

I think I did reboot 5 times, though I might not have. It gets locked into a cycle, each time it says it's successfully restored, then the next time it says it's corrupt again. I've never modified the number of backups.

While I have the 98 drive active I'll also try booting to a command prompt.

Shouldn't take me more than 5 or 10 minutes, max.

Viper GTS

 

[lowtech1]

Reset your Puter to default speed and then use a boot floppy to rescue the system.

Then get to a dos promt to recover your Registry by type SCANREG/RESTORE

If you don't have a valid backup the system will automatically try to fix your Registry if possible.

 

[Viper GTS]

OK...

I can get to a command prompt just fine. While I was there, I ran a scanreg (without the /restore switch). It did the exact same thing it does when I try to boot directly into windows. It says it's backing up system files, then it's restoring them, then I need to restart. And it keeps doing that. Will the /restore switch do anything different?

Viper GTS

 

[Viper GTS]

lowtech, I love you!

Restored a backup from two days ago, all I lost were the file associations for CorelDraw, which is easy to fix. I'm back up & running in Windows.

Thanks, guys, I knew y'all would save my ass! If I was old enough, I'd buy you a beer.



Viper GTS

 

[lowtech1]

Your Welcom Viper GTS.

The /restore switch tell the system to look for the most recent good backup file of your registry to restor, and it will atemp to fix your registry if it could not find a good copy out of the 5 copies. The backup of your registry is located in the RB0xx.cab files (xx is numbered form 01~99, but only 5 recent copy is keep)

 

[Rebels7]

Another way to fix this problem is to go to the windows directory and make copies of the user.dat and system.dat files, (while the machine is running properly of course). Copy these two files to a floppy disk and whenever you receive this error again, just copy the files from the floppy back to the windows directory!! This has saved my putute many a time!!!!

 

[lowtech1]

Rebels,

To add onto your USER.DAT & SYSTEM.DAT, is AUTOEXEC.BAT, WIN.INI & SYSTEM.INI on your boot floppy for a compleat backup system.

 

[arthurb1]

One more thing some people may need to do a CONFIG.SYS too. Hope that helps.

 

[Prodigy^]

just a tip of the /restore thing doesn't work - do a full surface scan with scandisc in DOS, you might have bad sectors. afterwards it'll try to restore the *.dat files controlling the stuff and should work. I tried that once, my computer just wouldn't boot :Q

 

[Ulysses]

I'm sorry.... I got here too late. But all's well that ends well.
Here's a link to a PC World Magazine article from June, 1999, dealing with these kinds of repairs in a comprehensive way:

http://www.pcworld.com/shared/printable_articles/0,1440,10584,00.html

These techniques have saved my bacon too.

 

[Ulysses]

ooops

 

[ltk007]

I always have an empty config.sys. That is a pretty useless file.

 

[Hyper99]

Sometime your computer will be screwed up beyond repair
that you need a full backup restore from say
drive image
Awesome program, its DA BEST
and yet expensive but well worth the investment of 50-70bucks.

 

[arthurb1]

I also have an empty one, but some people still load drivers through it for some legacy programs that they may be running.

 

[compuwiz1]

I pushed one too far last night myself. I'd never really found any value in the system file checker utility until then. I couldn't shut down or open outlook express, kept getting errors, illegal ops, etc.
I tried the file checker. It found and restored 15 corrupt files, most of which were dlls. Everything is now back to normal.