[Laffctx]

I have a IBM Deskstar 40 gig HD in a AMD Athlong XP 1800+ system using Windows 98SE.

I have a computer room that is upstairs and the heater in this house works REAL good. So, the temperature up here gets hotter than anyplace else in the house.

So, when it is fine everyplace else in the house it is hot as blazes in here. So, i shut the heat vent off.

Well, my system is working perfectly eccept for one thing. If I shutdown overnight and the temperature outside drops down to like 40 degrees overnight. It will be like 50 degrees in here and 70 in rest of house.

I have a thermometer in side my case and if I shutdown for overnight and early the next morning the temp inside the case is at 60 degrees and i cold boot up when it gets to windows it will give me "Windows was unable to access your registry file.............please restart so windows can fix the problem"..........i reboot and everything is fine the rest of the day. I can shutdown for 2,3, or 4 hours after that and cold boot and no problems at all........but the door to the puter room is open and it is nice in here like rest of the house.

Or, if i shutdown overnight and dont cold boot up until get home from work in the afternoon and the temp on the thermometer is like 68 to 70 degrees it will boot perfectly, no problems, everytime.

The only time i have this is when i shutdown overnight and boot up in the early morning hours when it is really really cool in here.

Any guesses?

THanks for you input,

Laffctx

 

[techiechick]

Why even shut down? I never turn my PC/Laptops off hehe but I am an UberGeek!! I just reboot it every few days of if my performance starts experiencing latency. hehe

Plus the hums of the hard drive help me get to sleep LOL


:chicken:

 

[johnwill]

This may have nothing to do with the hard disk. I'd start by opening up the system and reseating all cable connections and expansion cards. Don't forget the memory modules. I suggest you remove and replace all the connections, since we're trying to eliminate a poor contact. See if that doesn't make a difference. Being at 50-60F shouldn't pose any issue...

 

[Laffctx]

Could it be possible that the Power Supply needs to be replaced?

Thanks,

Laffctx

 

[johnwill]

Anything's possible. I'd start with the free solutions first, then work your way up to parts replacement. One way I shoot these kinds of issues is to use a hair drier to warm up various components, then see if that helps. You might try leaving the disk cold and warming up the MB the next morning, then see if it starts. By process of elimination, you may find the failing component. First, I'd still try reseating all the connections...

 

[Laffctx]

Wasn't temp afterall.............was dirty ram chip contacts..........working great now............cleaned them with an eraser and smoking now.

thanks for the input,

Laffctx

 

[Laffctx]

latest update...............it must have been the HD going bad cause yesterday it went to HD heaven...............so i got me a new WD 60 Gig 7200 and it is flying now.

I should have thought of that to begin with...............sheeeeeeesh!

Thanx,

Laffctx

 

[dawidi]

Hello there,
I think I am having the same problem as Laffctx. I'm running Win 98 on my "ubahnsound", a home built ASUS K7V333, Athlon XP 2000+, 512 mb DDR RAM, with two Maxtor HDDs, 30 gigs (UDMA 66) and 60 gigs (UDMA 133). With the 60 gigs HDD, a cold boot in the morning quite often results in an infinite ScanReg loop of backing up and restoring supposedly "good" registries. I usually reboot, go into DOS mode and manually copy back my system.dat and user.dat from another directory. As long as I only do "warm" reboots, everything works fine. If I set a password in the BIOS (so it has to stop before running Windows) and let the system "wake up" for a few minutes before booting normally, it works fine - well, most of the time at least. I recently lost the last two months of registry data again and it really makes me angry.
I moved Win 98 back to the 30 gigs HDD which never caused any problems on my old intel Celeron-466/VIA board. Now when I do a cold boot, Windows starts up but then crashes with a BSOD about the mouse driver, the kernel or anything else it likes. A warm reboot and everything is fine again.
On the 60 gigs, I also tried Windows 2000 and Windows XP professional, only to get similar errors.
Also ocassionally, when Windows switches to graphics mode during an otherwise successful cold boot, it only displays two green pixels at the top left of a black screen and hangs.

Maxtor's PowerMax utility reports both HDDs to be completely error-free, including the full scan - which is exactly my experience at any time more than 3 minutes after power on...

what the :upset: is wrong with my system? is it the mainboard?

 

[Laffctx]

well my thread was an old one. but mine did that for a couple weeks and then one day it just would not boot period. all i would get warm or cold boot was a black screen an "Hard disk error"

So, I replaced the HD with a new WD HD and I have had no problems ever since.

Good luck,

Laffctx

 

[dawidi]

I saw it was an older thread, but it was the only similar problem description I found on Google with keywords like "cold boot registry scanreg" etc.
I have had this problem since June 2002 when I got the new Mainboard, CPU, RAM and the 60 gigs HDD. I always thought it was that the new faster (UDMA-133) harddisk needed a longer time to spin up before it was ready and the BIOS didn't respect that. Or something. It was only last weekend that I realized that the problem exists with the older HDD as well, only with slightly different symptoms (BSOD instead of ScanReg).

As I said, both HDDs have otherwise worked perfectly for 18 or 30 months and have been "certified error free" by PowerMax (because the time it takes to load PowerMax from the boot floppy is long enough for the drive to spin up properly )

 

[Laffctx]

could be a cold sodder joint on the motherboard too..........but all i know is that when i installed the new hard drive and got rid of the IBM Deskstar the problem went totall away.

Good luck,

Laffctx

 

[dawidi]

I posted the problem again at amdforums.com. maybe they can help...