Mates Pc driving me up the wall

[Richie]

I made the fatal mistake of building a new PC for a mate and I am now lumbered with being their PC support for life

The Pc has had no end of problems. Data corruption etc was narrowed down to a fubar'd MB which was RMA'd and everything seemed to go fine till 2 weeks ago when he received the error

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

I had to do a clean install on the machine and now, about a week later, the error has returned


OS = XP SP2

There was no AV on it the first time but have since applied NAV 2005 on the clean install in case it was virus related.


Anyone know -

1. WTF is causing the corruption. Could it be hardware related or is it almost 100% likely to be software i.e. could my install be deemed as shoddy or is it down to programs and stuff being installed on the PC ??

2. Whats the easiest way to recover from this error. Can I copy this file from my own system across to his so get it working or is it a repair/reinstall ??



I plan to ghost the OS once its fixed (should of done it previous) but I could do with finding out WHY its corrupting and how to stop it


Ta

[menthel]

Is it overclocked? If so it could be causing corruption. It could be the hard drive going wrong, or the PSU might be on the blink. I reckon it could be either of the first two .

[Richie]

Not overclocked. PSU is brand new altho I may swap it for the old one and the HDD comes up clean on WD's data tools.

[schrickvr6]

Try swapping the memory, i've found that data corruption is often caused by faulty ram or the ram being overclocked to much.

[Capt Doufos]

I have had no end of this trouble at work. Turned out to be incompatible memory chips. Would work fine for anywhere between 1 day and 1 month.

[Richie]

Cheers, I'll swap the memory for the ones in my server rig (2*256 and a 512) and see how it goes.