registry problem

I was given a friend's PC to work on which had a failed power supply. I put in a new supply but could not get the machine to power up, so I unhooked the power leads to the all the drives one at a time to see if the P/S took a drive with it when it went south. Still no power up. I changed the memory, video card, took all the other cards out, still no success so I suspect the mboard to have gone with the P/S. I took all the hardware (including the cpu) and put it into a case with a known good mboard and P/S. It powers up fine, but every time I try to start windows even in safe mode, the windows registry checker starts and displays the following;

You have restored a good registry
Windows found an error in your system files and restored a recent backup of the files to fix the problem.
Press enter to restart your computer

when enter is pressed the machine restarts but goes right back to registry checker then the same message is displayed. I tried to manually restore from what appeared to be good backups with the scanreg /restore command, but on each restart the same thing.

I can boot to safe mode command prompt only, and to DOS by choosing step-by-step confirmation and bypassing everything.

When scandisk is run, it reports that there are invalid long file name entries, one of which looks like this-

c:\windows\system\kernel32 ".dll

and wants to repair them. I'm wondering if maybe this is a problem with the FAT, and if so is it possible to repair it. Any ideas?

This is a Win98SE system.

 

c:\windows\system\kernel32 ".dll
With that file with a corrupted name, windows is not going to run. Scandisk is the option to repair errors on the drive. After that is done, do this command, scanreg /fix, that repairs the registry. But you may not be able to run the scanreg /fix, as it requires Extended Memory to be available for that to function, and unless you can get it to boot to Command Prompt, or use a bootdisk, Himem.Sys will not be loaded.
The Registry Checker window usually comes up because windows has a problem loading the registry into memory, or the drive is corrupt where the registry is stored on the drive.
FYI, whenever I run across someone getting the runaround with the Registry Check at boot, I recommend instead of clicking on OK and letting the computer reboot, CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Close Program window, End Task on the Registry Checker, another window will pop up and say it is not responding, End Task there, also. Restart in Dos Mode, and use the scanreg /fix command, then reboot when you get the message that 'windows has repaired the registry'. Else, you will quickly run out of registry backups, as the 'old' registry is saved as one of them. Out of 5 backups, you will be able to only restore 3 if the run around is left to go on.
After the drive is free of errors, the corrupted files will need to be replaced.

 

Markp,

Thanks for the reply. I had started running Scandisk and let it repair one file called pdfview ".dll, but when I saw the kernel32 ".dll problem I began to wonder about a problem with the FAT and didn't let it go on. I'll run it again and let it do what repairs it can, making notes on the files that it tries to repair. I can extract any Win98 system files from the CD that need to be replaced. I can get Himem.sys to run by doing the step-by-step startup, so I'll try the scanreg again after scandisk does it's thing. Will post back with the results.

Thanks again.

 

If you can live without the current registry being backed up on a restore then include this undocumented line in scanreg.ini:

BackupCurrentBeforeRestore=0

With five backups you will have access to five backups but you must accept that the current registry will be discarded.

The line can, of course, be added to scanreg.ini whilst in DOS via C:\>Edit c:\windows\scanreg.ini and the line will be read at the next instance of scanreg.exe.

To revert to the default setup change to '=1' or remove the line.

 

progress update

I ran scandisk and let it fix all the invalid entries it found (there were two and a half hand written pages of them). The funny thing is all the invalid entries ended with a double quote ( "). Example c:\windows\system\kernel3 ".dll. There were two invalid directories both of which had a " as the last character in the name.

I allowed scandisk to run a media check as well and it didn't find any bad clusters. However, when it finished it displayed a message that the command interpreter could not be found, and I can no longer get the drive to boot. I can boot with a floppy and still get to the data on the drive, it just won't boot from the hard drive. I'm thinking it is time to salvage what he needs off the drive, fdisk, reformat and reinstall Win98.

Suggestions?

 

I see two options. You could use a boot floppy, use this command.
sys a: c:
That would transfer the files necessary to make the drive bootable, including command.com. But that is all it will do. I would say the chance of windows booting is slim. You could do an overlay install of windows, however you remember the condition the drive was in.
The format and install is a better choice, using this command.
format /u c:
Format will wipe the disk, and discover any new bad sectors, if any. If format does find any new bad sectors, the drive's reliability is in question. It could last two weeks or two years.

 

I thought about doing the sys command to see if I could get the drive bootable again, but there were a number of windows system files that were identified by scandisk as messed up. He has applied so many windows updates that restoring the files from the CD would probably create such a mismatch in file versions that windows wouldn't work anyway. I was able to get the data he said he needed copied to another drive, so I've suggested to him that a format and reinstall is in order. He's agreed so it looks like that's the path I'll take. I've also suggested he think about an upgrade to a newer board, and case. He was lucky this time that I had the spare parts to get him back to where he was with his old AT style board and power supply, as they are getting harder and harder to come by.

Thanks for the help guys.