Help! All heck gone loose!

[Pluto101]

Okay, I was experimenting in overclocking, I moved the fsb from 133 to 140. Worked fine, got a medium boost. Raised it to 145, temp's 55 C, got a stop error trying to load Windows XP. That's ok, I've got the generic heatsink anyway. Lowered it to 143, got to the log on screen, then crashed. Lowered it to 141, got to the log on screen, clicked on my logon, crashed. Lowered it to 140 again, got to the log on screen, could log in, froze trying to load my personal settings, pressed the reset button, lowered it back to 133, worried that it wasn't working. I logged in OK, but every single one of my personalized settings weren't there. I didn't even have an Internet connection! I was worried. I rebooted, still there. I didn't have a desktop, my user files were still there, but it wasn't accessing them. The oddest thing was, when I tryed to change some of them, they wouldn't change. Other times, it would give me an error. It was in Windows 9x style, but reported Windows XP. I had NO icons in the left-hand side of my start bar, it was almost as if I was in 9x Safe Mode. Some good news, though; I'm typing this from my mother's login, none of the other logins were affected. I created a personal diagnostic user. I could use this, delete my old login, re-create it, but there's alot of settings which I don't want to lose, and don't get me started on all the cookies I'd have to get again. Any help? My comp's stats are:

Athlon XP 1900+
GA-7VRX v. 1.1 (no, haven't had any traditional problems w/ this board)
256 mb of PC2700 ram
Geforce 3 TI 200 128 mb oc'd (that oc'ing went fine)
Sound Blaster Audigy Mp3+
80 gig Maxtor Hard Drive


Update: I had originally put this in Overclocking, but as the problem seems to be more and more windows based, I have decieded to put this in Windows XP, too. Following the suggestion of the one response I got, I put in the windows xp cd, and went to install, repair. I did the repair, and now XP only loads every once and a while, and has random reboots. I wasn't aware that the I would have to reinstall all my drivers. When it recovers from a reboot, I do a error report, and it comes back my Nvidia driver did it. I got the driver install in before it crashed. It comes back with the load screen, then a stop error that says BAD_POOL_CALLER, and dumps memory. Then it restarts. Please help me; anything at all. This machine was my baby, now it's crap!

[Tuf]

Welcome to the wonderful world of overclocking. What you have experienced is data corruption due to excessive error rates. The only sure fire way to fix it is to reformat and reinstall.
That's one reason not to overclock a system that is important to you. If you have backups of the things that are important to you it''s not a big deal. If not you may have learned a valuable lesson the hard way.
Without a format and reinstall I doubt you ever get it back to where it was. If you can log on as Admin back up what you want and start over. If not you might try putting the drive in another computer and see if you can find your stuff. The sad thing is almost anything could be corrupt so you may be reinstalling your problems. You might try system restore but it's unlikely it will fix all your problems.

[lil Jimmie]

This is a double post. I think the other one is in the Assembly/Overclocking forum.

[Tuf]

Thanks Jimmie I thought O was experiencing deja vu again!

[lil Jimmie]

Tuf, I had it happen three times and with the the cold medicine I've been taken it sure made an interesting evening.

[reboot]

A format and reinstall is not needed.
Boot to safe mode, and run System Restore.
You did make a restore point before you started experimenting, didn't you?

[Pluto101]

A. I'm very green at overclocking, I didn't make a system restore. Oh well. I got into safe mode w/ networking, and am in the process of backing up everything to CD (10 CD's!)

B. I'm very sorry about the double (actually, triple) post. Nobody had responded to my first post, and I had no idea what, if I could, to do. I had my parents down my neck, I was waking up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat, I thought maybe I was asking the wrong crowd. So I posted again, here, but still got no responce untill today. So last night I posted again, in PC hardware. Today I've got responces in all three. Once again, I'm sorry about the triple post, if it's against fourm rules, I wasn't aware, though that's no excuse.

[Statica]

I still dont understand this hobby of overclocking, if the machine is mission critical. You have a processor that's running at the equivalent of 1.9Ghz (equivalent to what AMD?). For crying out loud, what exactly do you run that requires a speed in excess of 1900 Mhz? Of course I would be on a minority on this board to say such things, but for me, I wouldnt dare doing an overclock on a machine that I needed, because things are bad enough with having to deal with my "I want windows" tribe here, and their apparent random BSODs and crashes, that I have no way of knowing for sure that it isnt now a machine issue.

I'd have to agree with Tuf though, a system restore may not give you the perfect solution back again. As with any system changes make backups of urgent material. You may have some amount of sucess deleting the items from your prefetch directory as well and start XP "afresh" so to speak

[GreyFalcon]

From the Command Prompt In Accessories type SFC /SCANONCE exit the program, put your XP CD in the drive you installed it from. Re-boot, and XP will restore any corrupted system files. It may not get your personal settings back, but it may save having to reinstall XP. Statica, overclocking is not for everyone. Some people never take a chance, and lead very safe lives, while others like to wring everything out of life. I attended the University of Viet Nam, so I never learned "safe". It's a hobby, it's fun, it's kind of like hot rodding my Supra, and then going out and straightening curves, and flattening mountains. Having said that, some do that in the family car, without a clue as to what they are doing with disastrous results.

[RoyKelly]

Just for the record, AMD has been rating its processors equivalent to Intel proccesors;
list][li]My old K5 100 that my BIOS reported as 73.3 Mhz Pentium was a processor running art 73.3 Mhz that acted like a 100 Mhz Pentium.
[li]My K6 400 actually ran at 340 Mhz
[li] My current Athlon XP 1600+ runs at 1.4 Ghz and out performs my wife's 1.7 Ghz Intel. Both machines run Windows XP Pro, Office 2000 Pro, and have 512 Mb of RAM.[/list]
Hope this helps.