PCI.sys corrupt error...

[rubberman]

running Win XP pro on a computer. and most of the time, but not everytime when it starts up it will get the DOS screen that says the "PCI.sys file is missing or corrupted....." and after a handful of restarts it will boot up XP. i even replaced the pci.sys file after it finally booted but its doing it again. any ideas why and how to solve the problem? its a 700mhz machine with 190ish mb of ram. its a computer that i use as my fileserver on my home network.

[redwudz]

Here's the most useful article on that error: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=330181 The rest of them just tell you to replace it with no reason given for it happening.

If you don't have a hardware problem, it could be RAM related. You have ~190MB RAM, if not all of it is accessible, you might be on the low side. You might think about upgrading to at least 256MB or more. Also run Memtest 86 on your existing RAM. http://www.memtest.org/

If you have added or changed any hardware on the computer lately, then that may also be a cause. Lastly, check your hard drives. Run CHKDSK and defrag. Those are both available in your disk 'properties'.

[cd090580]

You probably have a problem on your hard disk and windows has difficulties to read this file.

Use the diagnostic boot disk your you hdd manufacturer to check your drive.

[Bjs]

What format is the drive using .

After reviewing all ms knowledge based articles , having followed the advice several times as laid out by their shortcuts to simple replacement of the file , and several complete os reinstalls when the previous failed to hold permanent, and ms unable to help via technical support . I made a decision to use delpart to remove xp from the drive , and the hd's manufacturers tools to partition and format the drive to fat32 .

Problem resolved , and has not returned in the last 8 months , of course this meant either to replace the drive with a new unit , which was done , or to keep fat32 format and re-register the os once more by phone .

Some drives do become iffy under ntfs format , no reason for it , it just happens .

I have several drives , having suffered the same issues from customers systems , which are used for dummy os reinstalls for stability testing of hardware .

Best choice to avoid the problem is to use the hard drives manufacturer's tools to setup the partition table and to format them , and not to use the xp os setup for preconfiguring the drive .

If you want to test and compare hard drives , I suggest you download a bootable security linux distro by the name of insert . There's a hard drive testing tool , that when used , will flog the drive during a particular test (sounds like its about to take off - raw data read / write test), and you can compare the output info against the hard drive manufacturer's hd data sheet .

If this linux tool reports issues , trust it , the hard drive test utilities from the manufacturers will tell you absolutely nothing is wrong when indeed there is , or occassionally , they might suggest a replacement , but those tools are unreliable at best .

I personally , have never seen this issue raised or related to faulty memory modules , ever .

For memory testing , I suggest using the official utility from ms only , rather than memtest , as it has caused xp errors on late systems , suggesting an issue with memory , after running the test , and rebooting into the os , when none exist .

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

[rubberman]

i used the NTFS format. seems to running ok now