what does mup do?
note i put the hd in another machine as slave and renamed mup.sys expanded mup.sy_ to mup.sys and put it where it belongrd. then did a file compare of mup.syy to mup.sys it says they are the same . good old ms. files is the same but it don't work. argh.

David, I know this is a long topic with a lot of postings, but that's because there is a lot of information in here. One thing that's mentioned repeatedly is that while some people have had luck solving the problem by replacing mup.sys, more commonly that just happens to be the last "good" driver listed before the system encounters a problem and hangs. In that situation, focusing your attention on the mup.sys file will get you nowhere.

Bryan Hill tried to compile all the things that worked for various people fighting this problem, as an aid to others trying to troubleshoot their systems. You can see his list of things to check at the top of page 7 of this thread. You might want to try some or all of those suggestions.

Good luck,
Jim

Jim and David;

Take a look at my volley with Microsoft (page . Their tech support engineer and I had a final chat that will be shared with Microsoft Support.

Also with regard to this forum " Windows xp freezes at mup.sys", It's probably more helpful to search the net for
AGP440.sys. There in lies a trail that can be followed to an MS link.

Wayne

.

Hi Pete :o)
Right...
I have changed the PSU - same problem
I have flashed the BIOS - same problem

(at this point i hunted out the win98 stuff to try that)

I can boot to DOS but as soon as XP cd starts loading it seizes up
I can install 98 no problems (kind of) so i am assuming that there's some kind of hardware conflict between my setup and XP, which is a bit of a bugger to say the least, still at least i know what half the problem is. Now all i have to do is figure out which bit XP doesn't like! Time to "borrow" someone's graphics card methinks ;o)

Wayne, that's ever so generous of you, if things get desperate i may take you up on the offer *hugs*
Not sure how much the postage would be to the UK though *lol*

Well, seems my MUP.sys problem is caused by XP disliking my motherboard/graphics card, so there's one more thing for other people to check!

Thanks for the help guys, couldn't have done it without you!
Take care,
Fran :o)

Fran;

If you need some hardware, I've got an ABIT BH7 with CPU (2.4 P4) and 1/2 gig of ram sitting around collecting dust. Let me know.

Wayne

Wayne, thanks for the pointer to the agp440.sys writeup (the direct link to the page I believe you are talking about is http://tinyurl.com/8foq9 ). However, I disagree that it would necessarily be "more helpful" to follow those instructions than to read this thread. According to the MS writeup, the failure signature would be different than what this thread covers: It would show that the system was hanging at agp440.sys, not at mup.sys. If I had had that signature, I would have searched on agp440.sys to start with, and never found this thread. I suspect most other users with that problem signature will do that, too.

Thanks also for forwarding this problem to MS. You'll forgive me, I hope, if I don't hold my breath waiting for a patch to be released or an MS Knowledge Base page to appear addressing this problem...

Jim

Hi Franney,

Interesting that the machine will boot to DOS. That rules out a few things. I know that I should have asked this earlier but one just assumed, in error, that you had pretty up-to-date hardware. So with that said, what hardware configuration do you have?

I have installed XP on an old Soyo Mobo with a 1ghz P3 and a Geforce 2 GTS. That machine is over 5 years old and I never had a problem.

You might certainly be bumping up against a comaptability issue between your mobo/graphics card and XP. Although I would suspect that the default VGA drivers would work on some pretty old cards. IMO it's probably an issue with an XP default driver for your mother board. But at this point I'd believe that rain falls up.

Best regards,,

It seems most everybody has lost sight of the fact that it is NOT mup.sys that is actually the problem, rather mup.sys is simply the last file to load properly before Windows runs into the file that will not load correctly. David, this is obviously why renaming mup.sys didn't fix your problem, because it wasn't the problem to begin with. I think we all would have better luck by finding out what driver loads AFTER mup.sys, as this would seem to be where the problem lies. I don't know if the driver following mup is the same on every system or if it varies by hardware config, but it is clearly NOT mup.sys that is actually starting trouble. It's getting a bum rap.
Wayne, I'm interested in that mobo/proc/memory, can we work a deal? I'm running Gigabyte 6OXE with PIII 733 and 512mb PC133 (815E chipset won't support more mem) with XP Pro SP2 (no problems yet!) so you can see I could really use an upgrade <g>.

AGP440.sys

Re: AGP440.sys

You win. I give up.

Charlie;

Yeah! It's free give me your address (private) and we'll get you going. I've got tons of stuff that's gotta go.


Wayne

Wayne, sent you a private message.

Hi Pete,
OK, off the top of my head what i have is...
Abit KT7-raid motherboard with a 1gig AMD Athlon processor (flashed the BIOS and currently looking into flashing the RAID-array drivers and re-flashing BIOS but looks too complicated *lol*)
2 sticks of 256 dimm
Hercules 3D Prophet II max dual display graphics card
Santa Cruz something or other sound card
Hitachi Deskstar (is that IBM?) 120gig HD
Liteon DVD-RW
Liteon DVD rom
All lovingly arranged in my shiny new Antec p-160 case (which has caused it's own round of problems but don't get me started on that *lol*)

From what i have found out so far, there should be no compatibility issues between XP and the KT7 or the graphics card, as they are both XP friendly *scratches head*
(having taken all the PCI cards out and having the problem remain i can safely say the problem isn't with the soundcard, network card or modem, hence my assumption that it's the graphics or motherboard)
The Abit-usa froum makes for interesting reading though, with a lot of posts referring to a bad capacitator problem but having checked my board that doesn't appear to be the problem. I'm going to post over there and see if anyone else has any ideas more specific to the motherboard. I am also going to borrow a friend's graphics card and see if that makes a difference but i won't get to it again now til after the weekend as we have comapny coming over for a meal and a bit of a party :o)
Have a good one all, see you Monday *lol*

Take care,
Fran :o)

In reply to:
Interesting that the machine will boot to DOS. That rules out a few things. I know that I should have asked this earlier but one just assumed, in error, that you had pretty up-to-date hardware. So with that said, what hardware configuration do you have?

I have installed XP on an old Soyo Mobo with a 1ghz P3 and a Geforce 2 GTS. That machine is over 5 years old and I never had a problem.

You might certainly be bumping up against a comaptability issue between your mobo/graphics card and XP. Although I would suspect that the default VGA drivers would work on some pretty old cards. IMO it's probably an issue with an XP default driver for your mother board. But at this point I'd believe that rain falls up.

Hi Franney,

I just did a quick google on your mobo and installing XP and I found some interesting information regarding your board....and the Geforce 2 cards. I'll post some links here but just google for "ABIT KT7 installing XP" and you can read what I found.

-------------8<-------------------------------

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/archive/index.php/t-62877.html

Trying to upgrade Win2000 on an NTFS partition to XP. Setup goes as far as the first screen with the black background/windows logo after indicating that it is checking system. At that point the monitor goes completely blank and stays that way. No further HD activity. Have to reset.

I had to use the flash program from the ABIT website. The MSI flash program is buggy.
When I flashed the bios to 3.1 XP loaded fine. Problem solved. ALL KT7 series MSI boards will apparently require this to install XP except the turbo2.

-------------8<-------------------------------

http://www.short-media.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-18162.html

-------------8<-------------------------------

After reading this one it made me remember the problem I had installing my first RAID-0 rig.

When the setup program id loading you should press F6 and install the RAID drivers provided for your Mobo. When I did not do this the Setup program would lock up. I wonder if this is the problem you are having.

So check out this site for more BIOS infor on your mobo than you can shake a stick at.

http://www.sudhian.com/showfaqs.cfm?fid=2&fcid=23#196

--------------------------8<----------------------------------------------

A few other links show users having your problem when installing with the Nvidia cards. So if you have something else then give that a try.

Hello to All!

I would like to thank everybody here in this forum especially participating within this thread!!! This thread and his piled up information together with the Google search engine optimisation saved me at least 10 years of my life with this unbelievable MUP.SYS error.

I found this thread with Google and read this whole thing after encountering this MUP.SYS error out of the blue with my MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum Athlon FX55 WinXP SP2 system.

After weighing up all the arguments I was 99% convinced that in my case there was something wrong with ESCD area in the BIOS since I was testing a preliminary beta version 1.A3 of the mobo. I re-installed various images all with the same results – MUP.SYS error. Using the BIOS option with Reset Configuration Data [Enabled] has had absolutely zero effect. After resetting the BIOS the hard way with Clear CMOS reset jumper WinXP started again and everything was back to normal. After this trouble I have installed a DIY BIOS Clear CMOS reset switch outside the case to get quick access to this function. Pulling the power cord before using it is absolutely mandatory to avoid damage of the components!!! Don’t forget this it is the same with setting the Clear CMOS reset jumper.

Cheers

Hi,

I had this problem today and just solved it so I thought I would pass on what i did.

The computer worked fine last night and when I turned it on today it went to the screen that asks you if you want to start up Windows in Safe etc. or Normal startup. If you selected Safe Mode it would start its processes that were displayed on the screen but would hang after Mup.sys. Then you would have to restart the machine. If you selected startup normally or startup with the last correct settings then it would go all the way to the screen right before you get the account select screen but would then go blank, flash and blue screen so fast that you could not read it, then restart itself to go through all this again.

In this case I would normally reformat but i had stuff on the drive that I could not affoed to lose. After trying several things unsuccessfully, I took out my digital camera and made an MPEG of the machine starting up and going through that fast flash of the blue screen. Then opened the MPEG on a seperate computer and used Moviemaker to freeze the frame with the blue screen so I could read it. Seemed to be a hardware problem. But all I did was take the SATA cable on the motherboard side out and put it in a different SATA port and then restarted. It went through some sort of Disc check of the harddrive and then restarted itself and all is working fine now. Weird problem, eh. Hope this helps someone. Seaborn

Also wanted to add that after I changed the Sata port and the disc checked itself I was able to move the cable back to the original Sata port and it still worked normally. So all in all I have no idea what the problem was but it seems to be gone now. Good luck.

My main specs are:

Epox-8KDA3+
Athlon64 3200+
A-Data Vitesta ram- 1024mb
WD Raptor 10000rpm 74Gb SATA
Geforce 6800 128mb

Still fighting the dreaded mup.sys and agp440.sys issue (safe mode) and freeze during normal boot.
The system is a p4 2.8, 160GB SATA, 1GB PC3200 DDR RAM, 1xLG DVD-RAM/+/-R/RW Drive, 1x Pioneer DVR-106D DVD +/-RW unit, 1xfloppy drive, a nVIDIA FX5200 128MB Graphics Card.
System was assembled in Jan 2004 and was running XP Pro SP1 and was later upgraded to SP2 without any issues.

Current Situ:
1) PC takes some time to warm up - have to wait a while and press reset switch before it starts POST. (any clues on why?) changed video card after reading on warm boot/ cold boot issues but no luck.
2) In Safe Mode hangs in MUP.sys or at times at AGP440.sys.
3) Does not boot into Normal mode - wheter I press enter from the options window (like when F8 is pressed) or let it time out. Earlier it used to freeze at the next stage with the XP logo visible.
4) Cannot run Repair Instal as the system freezes midway (usually at the Kernel Debugger stage) and once or twice a little later.
5) Unable to boot in through a floppy or a CD - tried Bart PE DIsc, Ultimate BootCD, Seagate Utilities (my HDD is Seagate Barracuda SATA 160 GB 7200 rpm) - all of them freeze. (4) and (5) have meant that I cannot run the classic CHKDSK solution that seems to have worked for many.

SOLUTIONS TRIED:
1) Have tried rebooting with all PCI cards removed - hangs same wat as in (2) or (3).
2) Tried playing around with BIOS settings - no luck so far. BIOS incidentally was flashed to latest version available from manufacturer (Feb/ Mat 2005 version). The Mobo is a iWILL P4CT (http://www.iwill.com.tw).
3) Tried removing the CR2032 battery and setting it aside for 20-30 mins before rebooting - no change in status. Will try a new battery later tonight
4) Have tried disconnecting the DVD drives one by one and rebooting - no change.
5) Changed the video card with a new Albatron nVidia FX5200 unit - status quo.
6) Swapped RAM card slots and also ran a Memtest - seems fine.

Plans for tonight:
1) Remove CMOS battery and try booting
2) Replace CMOS batter and try booting
3) change a few more BIOS settings
4) change SATA port on my mobo - have two one Primary and Secondary - HDD is connected to Primary

The system was working fine with XP SP2 for over 8 months. The problems manifested as a "pc restarts on shutdown" issue (found no workable solution) and slowly moved to complete freeze of the system a few minutes after boot up. Power Supply seems fine - is a 400W Rated unit - so I suppose has plenty of juice still left.

Been working on this over a week now and still no solution in sight. Any ideas/ suggestions on how to get around? Tried the Knoppix Live CD (it worked fine before XP reinstal but freezes now after loading the KDE? desktop). Do not have another PC to test my HDD (for CHKDSK errors). Only other option seems to be replacing PSU, Mobo and HDD - for that I might as well buy a new unit.

Any help is welcome.

Thanks

The fact that you're not even able to get through POST until the computer "warms up" is a giant clue: Computers don't have vacuum tubes anymore, so if something needs to "warm up" before it will operate correctly, you have a component or some components that are failing.

The most common "gradual" failure is a capacitor drifting out of operational specs, usually because of leaking electrolyte. I have personally had this happen to me on three different devices (two motherboards and a DVD player). The good news is, you should be able to identify this problem visually, as the symptoms are pretty noticeable.

If you are not familiar with electronic components, the capacitors you're interested in checking are the cylindrical devices, (some are approximately the size of short cigarette butts, but you'll see many smaller ones and might see a few that are larger), that stand like small towers on your circuit board. Typically they have a plastic-looking dark blue, brown, or black casing, with white or light-blue print on them. They'll have a vertical stripe on one in the same color as the printing. The tops are aluminum, and often have a cross pattern or sometimes a "K" pattern impressed into the aluminum.

To identify failed/failing capacitors, look for prominent bulges in the aluminum tops (the tops are flat when capacitors are new), or any material that seems to have escaped from inside the capacitor at either the top or the bottom (it might appear brown, orange, red, blue, or black, and it might be powdery or oily, depending on how it was made). In any case, a "good" capacitor should always be "clean", so if you see anything other than that, you've found a problem. (Normal household dust is not an issue.)

If you or someone you know is handy with a soldering iron, replacing a capacitor is not a difficult task. Replacements might be available at your local Radio Shack or specialty electronic parts store, or they can be ordered from http://www.digikey.com. If you don't want to do the work yourself, you can probably take the motherboard to any TV or electronics repair place and have them do the work, though I don't know how much it might cost. (Replacement capacitors typically cost between $0.75 - $2.50 or so.)

Other components can fail gradually, too, and even capacitors can fail without showing obvious signs of leakage. But this is an easy inspection to make, and I think it's a good bet that you'll find a bad cap or two when you look.

You might consider this a sign that it's a good time to upgrade the mobo.

Good luck,
Jim

Disable restart on system error was the turning point for me. (suggested on top of page 7, just below the list of things to try) It finally showed the real problem: STOP: 0x24 - bad NTFS filesystem. Had to run chkdsk /p from the repair console. Try this FIRST if your pc stops on mup.sys. It'll save you a ton of headaches.

Thanks Jim. Will check out the capacitors tonight and revert. Had done a visual inspection based on a reading some place else, but could not spot anything in specific. A few small capacitors had some dirt on them (maybe they were leakages?) but dont remember spotting any bulge. Will check it out thoroughly tonight and maybe add a photograph in case my eye/ inexperience missed something obvious.

Could this be an issue with the PSU? I have a 400W PSU and in addition the system config, I have 3 PCI cards - 1xAOpen V1000 TV/ Video Capture Card, 1xUSB2.0 card, 1xIEEE1394 card. Have tried removing these and rebooting, but the warm up issue persisits, Hence had ruled out PSU from my side.

Tried clearing CMOS, replacing CMOS battery and also changed SATA port with no luck yesterday, Suspect a HDD issue as the Safe Mode now seemed to freeze at "ntoskernel". Let me get through with more checks and revert...

Thanks!