weird problem at boot up

[Dragonfodder]

I have xp pro AMD64 3000+ 120 gig Seagate SATA drive, NVIDIA 5500, 512 Meg
ram. At boot up, just as it gets to the windows screen (one with the moving
bar), my hard drive grinds for 5 - minutes then goes to the log on screen
and all is well. Every once in a while, it does this and it wants to do a
chkdsk and when it does, it says that the pagefile.sys is truncated. It
then grinds for 5 - 8 min and goes to log in screen and all is well. I
tried to do a console recovery with the xp pro CD but when I type the r for
console recovery, it grinds for 5 - 8 min and then dies... Hope someone can
tell me what to do here, I am pretty frustrated. I tried to delete the
pagefile.sys. Thought I had but after 3 good boots, back to my problem.
The last time it did a chkdsk it said something about pagefile.sys first
allocation ???? not valid.. didn't see it before screen changed... Hope
someone can help...

John

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Download the utilities file from Seagate and check the status of the hard
drive. It definitely sounds like it is failing.

 

[Dragonfodder]

I downloaded the tools from seagate and it passes all tests with flying
colors. I ran it several times. If I leave my computer on, there is never
a problem. The problem is only at boot up. And it seems that it always
involves the pagefile.sys.

John N.