Strange Win XP boot up problems!!

[samoo]

Hello, I'm beginning to have a very strange problem with Win XP and Win2K for that matter. I've installed Win XP a few times now, both Home edition and Professional, and after several days of problem free use, I'll try to boot up and get a blue screen, usually telling me the system cannot access the Master Boot Record, or cannot write to it, or it cannot access a certain file, i know i should have written down exactly what it says, but the errors are generally the same and its never the exact same message, it can't access some important file and eventually I have to do a full reinstallation. This is like the 7th time its happened to me. I even switched to Win 2k and that worked great for awhile and then I got the same message. But the thing is when I had Win 98 SE running on it, I never had any problems booting up, so I know its not the harddrive itself. I've tried both FAT32 and NTFS for the C:, but nothing seems to help. Anyone have a similar situation? I have a ECS K7VZA V.3 MB and a AMD 1.1 with 256Memory.

 

[TheWart]

if you do not have lilo or anything like that installed, just load in a win98 startup disk and switch to C: drive and use "fdisk /mbr". should allow you to successfully load xp.

 

[samoo]

Thanks, I'll try that next time, but will I have to constantly do this or it should correct itself after running this command? I can't figure out whats causing this problem all the time. It runs beatifully and then the next time I boot up these errors just pop up.

 

[check72]

I used to get something similar to that when I was overclocking my old system.

 

[samoo]

I'm not overclocking though. It just keeps on happening. I do have to install the VIA IDE Miniport in order for the DMA to work properly with XP. Otherwise my HD runs in PIO mode which is superslow. Oh well, any other suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks again.

 

[skyking]

Your hard drive may have started croaking out since you had 98SE on there. If so, a defrag may show some corrupt files, etc., when the computer is running. If the MBR gets corrupted sometime after a successful startup, the problem will not appear until the next boot.

 

[samoo]

Yeah that could be, I just thought it was too coincidental, and then I tried running disk checks on it, but in XP and I think 2k, the disk checking utilities are a little different, only chkdsk i think. Also whenever I have to reinstall, doesn't it run a scan on the HD before installing the OS. Thats why I don't its the HD, but I guess you can never tell.