Persistant XP problems

[ivorybow]

:shrug: I am having persistant problems with XP pro. I bought the upgrade and did a clean install with a hard drive wipe. About a month ago I started getting spontaneous reboots, with following boot failures with the message "NTLDR is missing" and telling me to Ctrl Alt Del to restart. Which did not work until I went into CMOS and redetected my primarey HD. This happened repeatedly. I finally turned off the shutdown and reboot in the control panel. Then today with no warning as I clicked on my address book in my email program I got a blue screen! I thought there were not supposed to be blue screens in XP! It was dark blue with white fonts that looked like DOS and said my system had been shut down to avoid damage and please contact my system administrator, and then gave a fault number which I was not able to copy. I have no system admin and am not on a network.

At that point I did a repair install and as the hardware was being detected about 20 minutes into the process I got this message "UNREGMP2.EXE -ENTRY POINT NOT FOUND. The procedure point GETIUMS could not be located in the Dynamic Link library MSDART.DLL" I was unable to close the window either by OK, cancel or Xing it out...so I restarted and the install finished without a stop. Every thing seems fine. All my drivers are up to date. Any ideas? Hardware failure? Fatal conflicts? I'm ready to go to Linux. Sometimes I think I emit an electrical field that causes my OS to fail. I never have had luck with Windows since 3.1.

AMD Athlon Palomino 1700+
512 DDR RAM
Asus A7N8X MoBo
MSI GeForce4 4200 128mg RAM (nVidia)
SB Audigy

[G Smith]

Ivorybow, here is a MSKB article for your NTLDR is Missing error.

MSKN NTLDR is Missing Article

Hope it helps. It appears that the root directory may have been fragmented so badly it cannot be read correctly.

[ivorybow]

:wave: Thank you. I ended up doing a repair install yesterday. One strange error popup I got during install:
UNREGMP2.EXE ENTRY POINT NOT FOUND
The procedure point GETIUMS could not be located in the Dynamic Link Library MSDART.DLL

Neither the OK nor the Cancel nor the X in the upper rt. corner of the popup box worked and I was forced to use my restart button. The installation picked up again after restart a good bit back from where it had frozen with that error message, then continued on alright. So far today no problems. I hope this fixed it. I just wonder if there is something I am doing that is causing my OS to destabilize. Like, using the unsigned nVidia drivers...is that really necessary or is that a MS money grubbing tactic? Windows update always wants me to install their nVidia drivers, but the current thinking is to use nVidia's. My sons never hesitate to reminde me that no one else they know has these weird problems. It's a family joke that I emit a strange electric field that trashes my computer. Games hate me. I've been a computer geek since the very first days...started out with a Tandy 186 and the BBS's. I think I know a lot. I built my computer...but these weird problems always come along. I never have a stable system. Is it me or is it Windows?
Thanks for the help.

[G Smith]

IvoryBow,

The only thing I can find about that error appears to be associated with SQL Server. Do you run that?

The suggestion to fix it is to install SP3 for SQL

Good Luck!

[PersianImmortal]

It's not a normal WinXP issue, I am 99% sure it's hardware related. In particular I can think of two things causing your problems - faulty harddrive and/or bad RAM stick(s). Either of these things can cause corruption of data and lead to the issues you're experiencing.