Mup.sys, Cannot boot to xp... Options

[snapplehooligan]

I have run out of ideas on this one... The situation is this: Booting into XP, before you get to the logon screen, the machine turns itself off. Starting in safe mode, it gets to Mup.sys then turns itself off.

I have the hard drive partitioned: the problem is occuring on a 50 Gb NTFS WinXP Pro partition(C:) - I am currently working from the other, 10 Gb NTFS Win2k Pro partition(D:). I have access to all of the files on the broken partition(C:). The machine has 128 Mb rdram pc800. Intel Pentium 4 @ 1.3 Ghz. It's a Dell Dimension 8100.

After googling the problem several times, I have tried the following suggestions that have all failed:

+Updated my BIOS to the most resent version
+Replaced the Mup.sys with a known-to-be-good uncorrupted copy
+Swapped my memory sticks
+Booted using the install disk and gone to the recovery console and entered "Disable Mup" also "Disable Mup.sys" - this generates an error about registry problems

There seems to be a lot of talk about this, but none of the forums I have read offers a difinitive solution. I have not installed any new hardware recently.

Any ideas would be very much appreciated... I have hit a wall, and I have work that I need to be doing

Thanks in advance to anyone who tries to help!

[Guest_im_not_you_*]

I make no guarantees. Do you have an on board device, and a pci device that do the same thing? eg; onbord lan, and pci ethernet card? try removing the pci, i got lucky and just switched pci slots, obviously , even though i had onboard disabled, it was causing conflict. Im not saying it is lan, but i am saying it is a conflict with devices. perhaps irq's? I just finished installing my 128 meg agp video card, a couple of blue screens and a safe start, and it seems to be okay. a good place to start looking for conflicts is in the registry, which is where i first started seeing the problem. everything seems solid now.

[Guest_VIA/ECS_*]

I make no guarantees. Do you have an on board device, and a pci device that do the same thing? eg; onbord lan, and pci ethernet card? try removing the pci, i got lucky and just switched pci slots, obviously , even though i had onboard disabled, it was causing conflict. Im not saying it is lan, but i am saying it is a conflict with devices. perhaps irq's? I just finished installing my 128 meg agp video card, a couple of blue screens and a safe start, and it seems to be okay. a good place to start looking for conflicts is in the registry, which is where i first started seeing the problem. everything seems solid now.

I am just curious to how many of you own AMD processors paired with either VIA or ECS boards. On top of that how many of you have SATA/RAID drives? A machine I built about 3 weeks ago for a friend mysteriously died the other day. It *supposedly* freezes at MUP.sys However upon further investigation that is not the case. SATA drives are fast....too fast for windows. As people shut them down PROPERLY windows is still trying to write the PageFile and flush it out, well it just takes one shutdown in the middle of flushing out the registry for it to ruin the registry and not allow system files to boot.

The only fix is to update your RAID/SATA drivers as well as flash your MB with an update.

Particularly this affects VIA KT600 with the NorthBridge/Southbridge chipsets.

[Guest_cshockey_*]

I have a fix for the problem:

IF:
1) Locking up at MUP.sys in both normal boot and any safe mode boot.
2) Any attempt to read from the disk locks up the application that is attempting to read/modify etc.

Problem:
Corrupt sectors on the disk.

Solution:
1) Take the harddrive and add it to another bootable WinXP image.
2) Chkdisk should automatically run on the corrupted disk.
3) Chkdisk will delete and replace corrupted files and mark the sectors as bad.
4) Add the disk back to the original system.
5) Boot twice (The first time you boot it may give you some form of "No OS exists on this disk, the Bios will update the drive information after the first boot).

Your good to go.

I'm from Microsoft and I appologize for any inconvience this may have caused. Though ultimately this could be attributed to the disk, hopefully the robustness of the chkdisk process is some sort of consolation. Also I appologize for having to have another computer, personally I just got a big IDE cable and ran it to the orignal computers drive (as to not be forced to remove it).

Thanks again.
Chris.