Windows 7: I broke 7100... temporarily

Well I've just had an interesting morning. When I went to boot Windows 7, I got a corrupt system warning. It wanted to do a sys. restore to try to fix. That didn't help. Put the 7100 CD in and it said boot record corrupt, want to repair? yes. Didn't help. Went through a bunch of diagnostics. No joy, but I could boot into my other OS to save my app data just in case. Only thing I could think of that I had change was in msconfig/advanced options I had check the use 4 CPU option and the maximum memory option. Finally got into safe mode with cmd. prompt and opened msconfig. Unchecked both boxes and everything back to normal.



Anyone else seen anything like this?

Thanks to these forums and learning a bit about the cmd. prompt I was able to get myself out of a total reinstall. Thanks.

Gary

So the option to use all cores and more memory at boot was the culprit? I have been using those settings for months. It must depend on a lot of different factors and the CPU and RAM type. Interesting.

Somebody posted a long time ago that checking that box to use the 4
cores, is a no no, they say that it is for checking when you have a problem
with your CPU, to let the system know something or other, if I come across it
I will post a link.

I have used those settings with all the previous builds I've tried with no problems. By the time I ran diagnostics and tried various things I finally remembered what I had done (wasn't awake yet) and everything now seems fine. Gonna try it again later (now that I know the fix) and change only one setting at a time to see which one it was.

Gary

Edit: thanks jfar. I'll try the memory first then.

Well, it was apparently the cpu cores that was the problem. Checking the max memory caused no problem. Odd since I had checked both boxes in Vista and several builds of 7 with no problems up to now.

Hello Gary,

What is strange is that the default if you do not check the box and set the number of cores is to use all cores.

This would suggest to me that this may be a bug that effects your machine rather than a more general one

I read that checking these boxes makes no difference anyways. If you have 4 cores, windows will use 4 cores. No need to tell it to use them if they already show up fine. Or is setting them to manually provide some benefit?

What is funny is that with all the other builds all the way back to pre-beta, this has never caused a problem. When I have time to mess around I may just try it again to make sure it wasn't some odd combination of things that brought it about. A near perfect storm so to speak.

Maybe Microsoft is getting rid of option to make Windows 7 dummy proof? Not saying you are in any way, but maybe that option will be removed in the future, or atleast have some other use. Seems weird that it would start causing an error. Have you checked any logs to see if it got reported?

I have to find a program to open the memory dump files. Saw something about that around here somewhere. Haven't had too much time to look into it. In the event logs I have several that say various services failed to start either because a dependency service or group failed to start or a device attached to the system is not functioning. Got these from the reliability monitor.


Gary