windows registry errors! help!

[hulkster]

okay, i have recently formatted a hard drive and was installing win98se on it, for my own purposes, and right in the middle of installing other things, i get a "windows registry error"  it pops up a message box that says that and then says that it has fixed the error and is restarting my computer.  i restart and everything is fine for a while, but then after so long, it does it again.  whats the deal?  by the way, its a new mobo and amd processor with new ram and stuff.  so basically i saved the hard drive from another pc (which i bought the hard drive online from newegg about 5 months ago) and put in a new mobo, proc., and ram.  everything is compatible, but im just wondering what the problem is?

also, i just checked it now, and now whenever i restart it gives me the same error, only now its in the form of a "bios-esque" looking screen that i get as soon as i boot up!  i cant even get into windows now!

[DZuroff]

The first thing I would do is test the hard drive.  You can either run scandisk with the surface scan option, or.. most drive manufacturers provide a free hard drive testing program.  The main purpose is to reduce the amount of RMA's on drives that actually are not bad, so if you run this program and it says your drive is bad, then your drive is bad.  The reason I suspect the hard drive is because you say windows will run for awhile and then encounters a registry error which is corrected and then windows runs awhile longer... it is possible that if the hard drive has bad clusters that the registry is corrupted.  

[hulkster]

alright, i have win98se, and im in the dos prompt right now.  i tried to type "scandisk" and "scansdskw" and a lot of these programs wont work because they require windows to run.  what do i need to do?

[GroovyTuesdaY]

Do you still have your boot disk handy?  There could be a scandisk on that boot disk.  Sorry my 98 skills are a little off. Its been over 4 years since i have messed with it.  Compared to xp, 98se sucks BAD. lol.

There is the possibility that you have bad memory or maybe the memory just might need to be reinserted.   I understand that most of the stuff everyone is throwing out there , are just shots in the dark, because lord knows working with some of this stuff is guess work science sometimes at BEST.        If you  can, write the SPECIFIC error down and post it here. That will give me something more to work with.

groovY~

[civic83]

I suspect bad memory as well, go to www.memtest86.com and download memtest, it is a small utility that creates a self booting memory test program, let it run for 2 or 3 passes on your machine (may take a while), if it doesnt generate any errors after 3 passes chances are your memorys fine.

[SirPeale]

Yeah, you did say this was a new system.  Please say you didn't get el-cheap-o RAM.

[hulkster]

no it wasnt cheap ram, its corsair.  i may just return my hard drive and memory back to newegg and see if that fixes it.  ill download that memory tester thing and see if thats the problem.