Win98SE Registry problems

[Charlie]

I am having problems with my registry. If I install new software/hardware, registry checker comes on and restores the original registry. I cannot get past this error. My system has worked fine for a year until this week and this problem. I don't understand whaat is causing problems with the registry. Any ideas??

[Danrak]

Salutations,
You could run scanreg which is supposed to scan your registry for errors. It has never found any on the computers I've done it on, so I can't tell you what happens when it finds one. Another thing you could is to restore an old copy of the registry. You computer makes a copy called system.1st when it first booted after loading windows. its located right in the c:\ path. just deleted the system.dat file and copy the system.1st to c:\windows\system.dat and you'll have a fresh registry.

[GOOF BALL]

and if you do as danrak says you will have to reinstall all the programs you have. also all changes to hardware will then be reset.
try to run scandisk and see if the registry is in a "bad cluster"
if the drive is a maxtor throw it away!!!

[Saki]

Maxtors are okay. If the above doesn't work, save all the stuff you want from the hard drive and try formating the hard drive and reinstalling Windows 98.

[Charlie]

I have formated the hard drive again and reinstalled 98. The problem continues. I even went back to a standard version of 98 and that encountered the same problem. No other files are being corrupted. Could the processor be throwing out bad data that only the registry checker finds?

[Charlie]

Here's the results:
It seems as if my Maxtor DiamondMax 6800 10GB drive was the culprit, atleast partially. After checking the HDD with MaxDiag, it found no errors, but after searching Maxtors site, I found a notice that the drive may not function correctly with Award BIOS's that do not support UDMA-66. I tried their patch, but it did not work and shortly after that, the drive packed up making only ticking sounds when trying to boot to it. I put back in a older Seagate 3GB drive, and everything installed fine.
One note:
Use Registry Checker in your utilities to maintain a current backup of your system files, it saves headaches down the road.

[murphy1]

I just have to reply to goof ball. why do you say to throw away maxtor drives???
i have been using them for years, and have come to admire thier technical support.
I can think of other drives that are *much*
worse. I have no complaints.

[goof ball]

have been trying maxtor for 12 years
every time i go and buy a some to try 1/2 of them go bad in a couple of months i can not have that need drive to last longer than that