WTF Windows?!

[SunnyD]

Out of the blue, today I come home from work, power on my machine at home, go out to cook dinner. I come back in about an hour later, and instead of the normal login screen, I have a console-mode screen saying the "file" C:\WINDOWS\system32\config is corrupt with the typical insert your CD and repair.

Of course, that didn't work. Tried the suggested repair, which as soon as the console loaded the system rebooted.

Nothing new installed, nothing changed. Just randomly out of the blue. This is a fairly fresh install of windows too. Everything has been stable until today.

 

[SunnyD]

Alrighty then. Installed a second copy of windows on another partition, backed everything up, and then tried on a whim to boot back into the original partition. And now it works. WTF some more!

 

[frogger9]

I've seen similar behavior with faulty memory. I'd try running Memtest86+ to verify that this isn't a hardware (at least memory) problem.

 

[cubby1223]

There's a reason for it. I've seen that happen on a number of computers, and you have to boot into the repair console and run chkdsk against the partition, and it will all come back. So when you installed XP onto another partition, at some point during the process it ran chkdsk and fixed the problems with the drive.

It has nothing to do with good memory or bad memory. I don't know the cause, but it is purely software.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: cubby1223
There's a reason for it. I've seen that happen on a number of computers, and you have to boot into the repair console and run chkdsk against the partition, and it will all come back. So when you installed XP onto another partition, at some point during the process it ran chkdsk and fixed the problems with the drive.

It has nothing to do with good memory or bad memory. I don't know the cause, but it is purely software.

While I don't discount your thoughts that chkdsk corrected this, the file system doesn't just decide to get corrupted. Most likely the underlying issue is still bad memory or a faulty proc.

 

[Brazen]

I think WTF? should be the name of the next Windows version... Windows WTF?

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: Brazen
I think WTF? should be the name of the next Windows version... Windows WTF?

I was going to post a meaningful reply, but this... it just made me laugh. Then I tried to write the reply, and could only think of 'Windows WTF?'.

Windows WTF? Professional Edition
Windows WTF? Home Edition
Windows WTF? Server

I'm down with that.

Anyway, everything has been happy since. I've had all sorts of weird problems with systems lately (just had one at work have a 1GB module spontaniously go bad). Bad something-or-other doesn't surprise me.