ramdisk.sys is corrupted

[Guest]

Hello and thanks in advance to anyone who can help this poor frustrated noob!

I recently bought a new p.c and it has started acting the fool. First it
began to hang on the Windows XP boot screen (with the progress bar).

I got the machine to boot from the cd and entered the Recovery Console where
i ran CHKDSK /R and after awhile windows reported that it had "found and
fixed one or more errors" woohoo.

I type EXIT and it restarted and got to the welcome screen and hung, had to
resort to the restart button and when it had restarted and finished diplaying
the IRQ assignments it reported that c:\Windows\System file is corrupted,
this is bad!

I tried Recovery console again and tried the FIXBOOT command (now I know
that this was pretty stupid cos I don't really know what FIXBOOT does but, i
thought "how could something that starts with the prefix FIX be bad?")and
windows carried out and completed the operation and again i type EXIT and it
restarts and again hangs on the welcome screen

But I know that i can just reinstall windows by pressing Enter instead of
going into Recovery Console(or am I wrong? And will it overwrite all my
documents and pictures etc?)

So on the fourth boot from cd windows is loading all the setup files and the
machine displays "ramdisk.sys is corrupted". I tried going through the boot
from cd routine another two times and same error report each time!

Could someone please,please,please illuminate this dark horrble nightmare
which has become my p.c.

1.Is this ramdisk.sys error hardware or software?

2. Did my irresponsible use of FIXBOOT do this?

3. Is there a way to get out of this without formatting the c: drive?

4. Am I an idiot or what?

 

[Jerry]

Boot from the XP CD and do a REPAIR install - should fix your problems.

 

[Guest]

Just thought I'd update the thread incase anyone out there ever suffers the
same fate.
On a hunch i ran Memtest86 from bootable floppy and after it completed the
full suite of tests it proved that my RAM was totally corrupt (10636 errors,
nearly every address call failed!). So the last time i had shutdown the
computer the Windows/system file was saved to the harddrive corrupted from
its time spent in the RAM. I'll have to return the RAM and possibly follow
Jerry's advice if the FIXBOOT didn't repair the system file.