Windows Registry Recovery error message

Hi guys,

I have a Gateway 500S P4 256 RAM 20GB HD on the bench. Customer gets message:

"Windows-Registry Recovery

One of the files containing the system's Registry data had to be recovered by use of a log or alternate copy. The recovery was successful"

She had another repair shop rebuild the OS twice now to try to fix this. She then gets this message again and after a few days, the pc will not start. The pc comes up with the message after a so-called successful recovery on the next startup again. A few days later, it can't start.

I was able to start the pc in Safe Mode so I felt encouraged to go ahead and format the drive NTFS and reload XP Home. After I installed Service Pack 2, on the restart, (bear in mind this is a fresh reload after formatting), here is the same message again on my bench as well.

I have been to Microsoft and read up on this message and saw that no further user intervention is required. That isn't too helpful at this point. I realize what Windows does to react to this, but that isn't shedding any light on the cause.

I also googled it, and found someone else with the few-days-to-no start-at-all scenario, and no answer as to cause.

Any of you guys run into this? Possible hardware connection here?

my guess would be a memory error is casuing windows to crap its pants. eventualy it runs out of backups or the registyr is so corrupted that there is no point.

run a memory testor from floppy disk.

I've got a Microscope floppy testing the RAM now.

On one of my reboots up to this, I noticed some red lines across the monitor on the desktop. They were kind of frozen there, no movement. PC had GeForce 2 in it. I pulled it and put in a GeForce 3 (all I had in the way of cheapie replacement). So far so good as to the registry recovery messages, it has not re-appeared after several reboots.

Until it does re-appear (he said, not so optomistically) I will continue with the RAM check and try to figure out what to try next if this doesn't work.

Thanks for your suggestion.

Yeah...my guess would be memory, or maybe the CPU is on the fritz. That's gonna be a hard one to peg down if memory doesn't fail flat out...either way, it sounds like software has been ruled out thanx to the previous OS reloads. However, you still may want to check and make sure the previous shop hasn't loaded any funky software that may be tripping the system out...

I have had that problem with sectors going bad on the hard drive. The best way to test is to use a new hard drive and see if the problem comes back.

If the problem returns and the memory checks out you might have a bad processor.

I used to get that error on mother boards with external cache and one of the chips was bad.

I agree with tyamada. If it's swapping files out of old registry backups... I'd tend to blame tha hard drive first, not the RAM. But as other have said it could be that and I agree, but when it comes to registry errors most of the time it ends up being the hard drive for me...