Hi Jim,

The last time I encountered the problem I was still an Everquest 2 addict. Well I have kicked that and gone back to playing FPS. BF2 is Battlefield 2. They have a problem with the client where if it fails to connect to the server then you can be left waiting for 30 mins before the client time's out. To make matters worse you can't ALT-TAB or get to the Task Manager. This leaves the old three-finger-salute, or today the "hold-power-button-for-10-secs" as the only way of getting out.

Interestingly enough I can get my PC to reproduce the BSOD (ACPI) error if I do this enough times in a row. So I've been able to test a few solutions.

In my case it looks like by doing this some BIOS setting, that you cannot see in the BIOS screen gets out of whack. This in turn causes Windows to get upset and throw the BSOD.

In general completely removing all power to the PC, removing the CMOS battery, resetting the BIOS and ESCD data, fixes the problem. I did have to repeat the process a ouple of times but it does seem to work eventually.

One other oddity was that the drivers for the soundcard got whacked as well on one failure. So I had to reinstall them. Now this could be a result of a hard shutdown as one knows this is not a reliable way of shutting down Windows.

Now I only wish there was a way to detect what had gone wrong in the BIOS and what exactly is making Windows upset.

Just for the record to help other problem solvers, this is not the symptons of the problem I had. I never saw the BSOD - just couldn't boot and found it stopped after MUP.SYS.

Hi guys,

Same problem here

Background:
WinXP pro including sp2 running at FAT32 on my Epox8rda3+ mb. Win98SE on first partition.
After a fresch installation on the third partition and playing around with drivers for few weeks I decided that it is now good enough and worth "registering" at Microsoft to keep it running past the first 30 days.
I did and quite soon I got the first "automatic update". Two updates that did not look to scary so I accepted.
Everything fine so far.
Next day (after reboot) I suddenly got 26 security updates "free of charge".
I did not have the time to check them all so I thought I will do that later after checking again (yes, I'm quite suspicious to anyone installing anything on my pc without a good explanaition, I think everybody should be).
I switched of the pc and to my big surprice XP decided to install all those 26 updates telling me not to unplug the pc while this procedure was ongoing. XP will shut down itself when ready. s**t! I hate when pc's are doing things whituot my explicit acceptance.

Problem:
Next day, when I had more time, the PC did not boot to winXP.
OK, I'll try the old "reliable" win98. Even win98 did not boot, freezing halfway.
Trying safe mode, win98 did boot in safe mode and I could verify the xp security updates.
I renamed the anti virus directory just in case and tried xp safe mode.
Well, guess where it hanged - mup.sys

First tests:
I renamed mup.sys just to find it hanged on the next file and so on in opposite order.
...
fastfat.sys
ksecdd.sys
ohci1394.sys
1394bus.sys
nv_agp.sys
mup.sys

I searched microsofts support pages without finding much of interest.
In fact I got more than 20000 hits when searching for: xp mup.sys on google.
Quite scary, I now realize that this is a very common problem and microsoft more or less ignores it
I found this place (thank's guys and tried few other things like disabling processor cash, changing harddrive cable and few other things that helped other victims but not me.
Hmmm, 20000+ faulty harddrive cables or memory modules ;-)

What worked for me:
I booted with the XP CD, entered my admin password and run chkdsk /p on all my partitions.
Bingo, it worked and still does. After long delay I got XP up and running so I can now write this long story.
Suddenly win98 is also booting!!!! What did XP do with 98???

What we need to do now!
Let's go together and bomb Microsoft with our problems and require them to write an article about this mup.sys problem and how to cure it. Microsoft is the only company with both source code and expertice to explain for us what is the problem really. It has been around quite long probably before win2k so it is time someone at MS lifts the cat on the table so we all can see it.
Remember, united we can win. One by one we have no chance in hell.
The point is not to flame microsoft, the point is to share the knowledge so others don't need to spend time and money on romours.

Thanks again for your help on this site and for considering the next actions.
Matti

Mine always takes longer on mup.sys than any other file. how logn have ypou waited wayne?

By far the biggest issue with this problem is that there are so many possible causes and therefore different problems that all result in only a handfull of visable outcomes. If Microsoft was to do anything then they should provide better tracing for boot issues.

So far I've personally seen three issues:

1) BSOD and immediate reboot.

This one usually occurs after MUP.SYS has been loaded and if the startup is set to not automatically reboot then the BSOD is usually indicating a problem with ACPI. Not that this has anything to do with ACPI but is simply indicating that the BIOS has somehow gotten corrupted and needs to be straightend out.

2) Freeze at the Window splash screen.

Since there is absolutely no message produced here and nothing usefull in the bootlog files then it's anyone's guess as to what this really means. When this has happened to me a few sucessive reboots usually got the PC booting again or eneded up at 1).

3) BSOD, System halted or other very short message. Again no real indication of problem here. I've seen 1 and 3 happen interchangably.

Now as far as solutions go so many different things have worked for so many different PC's. Not only that sometimes when solution x helped previously now only solution y works. Does this indicate a changing problem or something else more abstract that is fixing the problem, I honestly have no idea and this is why we need more tracing information from the OS.

So to put things into perspective here are my top things to do.

1) BSOD during boot. This is most likely a BIOS issue.

Personally forget trying to boot to safe mode here. This sometimes works and sometimes does not. When it does work usually this does not stop the machine BSOD when booting to the full OS.

So to attempt to fix this issue I pull out all stops to force the BIOS to rediscover the components on the machine and hopefully straighten itself out.

a) Turn off the PC and remove the power cable from the PSU.
b) Open the PC and dissconnect all cables, remove all PCI cards and memory. Replace memory and graphics card and plug cables back in. (This just ensures that the problem is not a loose or badly fitted cable and trust me it does happen.)
c) Remove BIOS battery and place to one side. (Have a new battery available since a bad battery causes all sorts of BIOS problems.)
d) Reconnect power and boot to BIOS.
e) Reset the BIOS, and if available, set the BIOS to reset ESCD data. (The ESCD data is basically your motherboards knowledge of devices connected to it. This is so the OS does not have to manage the IRQ's etc and the mobo can determine all the settings for you. If this gets messed up there is no way of telling other than the machine failing to boot, hmmm, or not operating correctly.)
f) Save and reboot to BIOS again, still without the battery installed. As long as there is power to the mobo your BIOS settings will not get lost.
g) Change any absolutely necessary BIOS settings, such as changing the RAM to non-ecc if you do not have ECC memory. Do not overclock or turn on any speed boosting enhancements yet. We want to boot to a stable environment first.
h) Save and boot directly to the OS, forget Safe mode it will not help us here.

If you still BSOD then repeat steps e) through h) a few times. (For some reason it can take a few tries to get the BIOS to truly clear itself up.)

Hopefully now your booted back into Windows but we're not finished yet.

i) Reinstall BIOS battery and reboot. Then shutdown, remove PSU power, wait 10 seconds, plug in power and reboot again. (This ensures that the BIOS information is sucessfully saved by the battery. If you have a bad battery the chances are that the problem will appear again when you reboot after removing the power.)

Finally you should have a stable system again. For how long nobody knows but for my PC that trips this issue these steps have always resolved the problem. Your results will vary.

Now if you have any PCI cards left out of your system add them back in one by one.

2) Freeze at Windows Logo.

This could really just be the same issue as above just manifesting in a different way. So this technique should also be tried if the above does not work.

Sometimes it really is as simple as a bad HDD. This is especially true with SATA drives since the SATA 1 drives have a pathetic data connector which can come loose. I've personally had the problem where my SATA cable got nudged when the case was closed and caused one end of the cable to pull away by a mill or so. By simply pushing on all the connectors the problem went away.

Now if the connectors are good then you actually might have a problem on the disk. The easiest way to check the disk is to boot the Windows CD-ROM to the Recovery Console. Once booted to the console you can perform a "chkdsk /r" to attempt to repair problems on the disk. I've had this happen a few times since my main rig is lugged around the country and now and again takes a nice whallop. Once the disk is repaired try rebooting back to Windows.

-----------------------------

Conclusion

There is a lot of usefull information in this thread and I heartly recommend anyone with booting issues to read the entire thread. Yeah, I know its a long thread, but this is the probably the 10th time one of us has revisited the common steps to resolve the issue. I've probably missed some stuff that might actually help you fix your particular issue since this thread is more a generic thread on booting issues that occur AFTER loading MUP.SYS and not related to MUP.SYS at all.

I check this thread at least four times a day and will gladly attempt to help all that have problems with booting. I personally know how irritating this problem is and if I ever ran for President this issue would be my platform. lol. But please, please, read the thread and post what steps you have tried and the results you observed.

Oh and one other usefull piece of information: There is one sure fire way of messing up something in your BIOS and causing the BSOD and that is to shutdown the PC by powering off. Only do this in extreme circumstances. I actually use this method as a way of generating the ACPI BSOD to play with fixing the problem, masochist that I am.

I volunteer at my college's student-run help desk, and I recently had an odd service call that involved mup.sys. Reading all the posts gave me a lot of information, but little that applied to this situation at first blush. The user is going to take his computer, still under warranty, back to the store at which he bought it.

The user's problem was that, after playing with the color settings in his display configuration (Windows XP, probably SP2, although I never did find out, shame on me), he would get a blank black screen after the Windows XP Loading... splash screen. At first I thought it was a hung boot, but he showed me that, with the sound on, you could hear the default winlogin sound play and even chime noises when his automatically logged-in AIM client received a message. The computer was getting to the desktop, but not displaying anything. I tried booting into safe mode, intending to reset the graphics configuration, but was stuck at the now infamous mup.sys line.

Again, computer seems to boot normally except for not having any monitor output when it reaches the desktop stage, but Safe Mode hangs at mup.sys.

I'm not discounting any of the previous suggestions as to where the problem lies, but I hadn't seen any indication that it only actually hung in Safe Mode, although I may have just missed it.

There's really nothing new I can add to solving the problem, just another odd instance where the elusive mup.sys hang has showed its ugly face.

Hi Karl,

It's always refreshing, if not as well saddening, to add yet another boot issue to this thread.

You have down exactly what I would have done in trying to get into safe mode to remove the video driver. Now I know this sounds crazy but did you remove and replace the video card and check all the cables? The fact that the PC boots into Windows and not into Safe is interesting. There certainly appears to be a problem but it's does not have the MO of any one that I've seen yet.

Sounds like a case of the crapped out video card blues to me. That or there was already a driver issue waiting to reak havok and messing with the display settings set it off. Why this would cause the system to hang after MUP.SYS is just one of those mysteries that only the guys at MS could tell us.

It's possible that you can remove the driver from the Windows Recovery Console but you'll need someone else to explain how to do that.

I'm sure the techs at the computer store are going to feel like they've had a frontal labotomy after working on this machine.

To be serious. I'd borrow another video card and plug it in and see what happens. Even with the wrong drivers the machine should still get to the desktop where you should be able to remove them.

If you do find out what happened then please post it here.

I had the exact same problem, and tried the BIOS, USB, and all the other things I could find.
Nothing worked, but...

I MANAGED GET MINE FIXED

How? Delete the file C:\ntbtlog.txt

That's all it took. At least it worked for me.

Delete ntbtlog.txt? What prompted you to try that? Any theory on why deleting a text file would resolve a boot issue?

I have one word for that fix...Spooky.

I'll give it a try next time.

I booted to DOS, and used the free program NTFS4DOS to access the hard drive. NTSF4DOS comes with a chkdsk program and a defrag program. Chkdsk made it through ok, but when I ran the defrag program, it hung on NTBTLOG.TXT.

I did try to boot after running chkdsk, but it still had the problem.

I rebooted to DOS and NTFS4DOS again, and deleted the file, and bingo, all is well.

Lads/Lasses

Got to say a big thanks to the people that have left this thread up so long. I did read the whole thing, and I am happy to say I eliminated the 'halt after mup.sys' after resetting the CMOS. I just wonder if Microsoft are ignoring this problem because it might be CMOS battery failure related? Knowing full well that the battery going can play havoc, it's just a thought.

Anyway, thanks again to all for the thread.

Cheers

Hi,

Well I'm both frustrated and relieved today.

Yesterday I upgraded my 6600GT to a 7800GT. Well all was well until I tried to play BF2. I'll keep my opinions of that games buggy behavior to another forum but to say the least it hung my machine and required a hard boot.

And shoot me dead if I'm lying that damn machine BSOD with my infamous ACPI error.

Now armed with all that I have managed to learn over the past few months I thought that this would be a snip to fix. Well bugger me this time it gave me a few headaches but I decided to keep pen and paper handy and write down everything.

So for those of you out there here's a little history of last nights events.

Ok so I upgraded my video card. I followed all the corerct procedures in uninstalling drivers first etc. In fact installing the card and drivers were no problem.

So I set upon running 3DMark03 to test the baby out. Well after an impressive gain from 9100 to 16000 I decided to test a few applications. First was EQ2, set the game on Very High and found that with all this new eye-candy the game played well. Now onto my nemesis, Battle Field 2. Some of you probably know that this is a really good FPS, when the game works.

Well I get in game with all sttings maxed, press the zoom button on my sniper scope and the game hung. Ok so now I had to hard boot and I'm certainly not feeling any love as the machine gives me the BSOD on ACPI.

Ok so now I followed most of my usual plan.

1) Unplug PSU. Remove all power cables from mobo. Remove CMOS battery.
2) Plug in everything except the BIOS battery.
3) Boot to BIOS. Reload Optimized Defaults. Change memory back to non-ecc, enable USB mouse/key.
4) Reboot OK.

Great I was thinking.

5) Shutdown.
6) Reboot OK.

Fantastic.

7) Shutdown. Reinserted CMOS battery and tested boot again. No problem.

8) Boot to BIOS. Turbo Mode.
9) Reboot. BSOD (ACPI)

Poop.

10) Boot to BIOS. Change mode back to normal.
11) Reboot. BSOD (ACPI).

Now how can this be. All that changed was the memory timings from changing to Turbo. And then I set them back and it still failed.

Ok so rather than mess around I decided to go back and repeat steps, 1-4.

12) Boot OK.
13) Boot to BIOS. Change audio mode to Azaila and set date.
14) Reboot. BSOD (ACPI)

Now it's got to be joking right? The machine boots fine after resetting the BIOS but any single change causes it to BSOD again. Now evaluating my test I realized that when I rebooted after a sucessfull boot I was chosing the "Restart" option and not a full power off.

So.. Repeat steps 1-4, agian. This time in addition to removing the power cables I removed and replaced the DDR2 sims aswell.

15) Reboot. OK. (Restart)
16) Reboot. OK (Shutdown)
17) Reboot. BSOD (ACPI)
18) Reboot. BSOD (ACPI)

Now this seemed odd. Simply by choosing to power off instead of a restart I got the BSOD. What unseen issue was surfacing when I powered off the machine?

Aha.So I thought that resetting the ESCD data occured when choosing to Reload Optimized defaults. In fact when I boot it does say "Resetting ESCD". Well I thought that it couldn't hurt anymore to try this in addition to steps 1-4.

So I started a completely new test.

1) Unplug PSU and remove all power cables from Mobo. Wait until no more sound from DVD or HDD and mobo led lights have gone out.
2) Reseat DDR sims.
3) Boot to BIOS. Reload Optimized defaults. Reset ESCD (Enabled). Memory to Non-ECC.
4) Reboot PC.

PC Boots fine.

5) Reboot (Restart)
6) Enter BIOS. Enable USB keyboard/mouse. Reset ESCD (Enabled).

PC Boots fine.

7) Reboot (Restart)
8) Enter BIOS. Turbo. Reset ESCD (Enabled).

PC Boots fine.

9) Reboot (Restart)
10) Enter BIOS. Dissable 1394, Not used. Reset ESCD (Enabled).

PC Boots fine. Ok so I have a booting PC with all the BIOS settings I need. So here is when I decided to perform a full system shutdown and reboot.

11) Shutdown.
12) Reboot.

Great the machine booted. In fact from here on the machine is stable.

That is until get c**ky and start to OC my new 7800GT until it becomes unstable. So I set the Memory to 1300 and the Core to 520 using Riva Tuner. I had to press "test" a few times until it passed, ( A warning of bad things to come but man I'm already having a bad day what could possibly get worse?)

Ok so in 3DMark03 I'm watching the screen like a hawk for artifacts and so far all is good. It got to the pixel shader test, the one with the Elephants, this is where my 9800Pro goes all sparkly, and all looks good. Then I notice a couple blue pixels which really should not be there. Then I realize that the benchmark has crashed. Crappola hard boot time. And you got it. BSOD.

Well I ran through my latest steps and the machine was back up and running in less than 10 mins.

Ok I've pulled the net a little tighter on this recurring problem on this machine.

It appears that Resetting ESCD data is key to resolving the problem. In fact it does not hurt to do this anytime you go into the BIOS.

It appears that this has more to do with the BIOS/Mobo combination than a problem with Windows. Restarting the machine is obviously leaving the machine in a semi-shutdown state as it reboots. Shutting down the machine causes some setting to get upset in the BIOS. Resetting ESCD resolves this.

I'd need to go trip the problem again, which is not a problem for me, but I think that the machine always works when ESCD puts the Video Card on IRQ7 and ACPI on IRQ9. The one time I did see it fail the Video Card was on IRQ5 and I did not notice the ACPI setting. I'll pay attention and run some more tests with this.

IMHO, this is not a Windows problem in my case. It's definately a mobo/BIOS issue. Now Windows could help us debug the problem by giving us more information on what is going on.

So I'd like to be first to state that with the following configuration you are at risk of these BSOD (ACPI) errors.

Platform:

DFI-Lanparty 925X-T2.
BIOS V113, 01/13/05
P4 3.2 (probably not a concern)
2Gig Corsair Value Select DDR2 , (Did have the issue with 1Gig)
BFG 6600GT or BFG 7800GT
Win XP Pro SP2 (Probably not a concern)

Issue:

Shutting down via the powerbutton or losing power can cause the BSOD (ACPI) on reboot. May be able to boot to Safe but not Windows.

Ok so I'm a cheap b-stard with the memory but the extra $$$ for less than 10FPS is not worth it to me. Putting that money into a better GPU is.

This configuration has caused this issue about a dozen times since I first posted to this thread. It's also the only PC that I have ever had this issue with.

Oh well that's it for now. Time to play.

I also have this program but its a bit differnt,, right now im running the hard drive on my Modded Emachines computer and it works fine. when i hook it up to my other older comp that was built and has an Abit se6 motherboard,, it wont load.. I rememberreading something about another keyboard and you switch it from 1 to 0,, Wtf Does that mean..

You didn't give any real information for me to work with, but I'm going to take a wild guess that you're using WinXP. If so, the "problem" is that you can't just pull a WinXP-loaded boot drive out of one machine and stick it in a machine with a different mobo/CPU. You need to partially re-load WinXP to get the correct drivers installed. You won't lose any installed applications, and it's pretty painless. Go here for the detailed instructions: http://www.theeldergeek.com/replace_motherboard.htm (or http://tinyurl.com/8d8s7 ).

I had same problem with 2 Raptors in raid 0 (but in BSOD and raid 1 was OK) on mobo gigabyte ga-k8nmf-9 ("not ultra" - sata 150mb/c).
I change to mobo DFI LP UT NF4 ULTRA-D ("ULTRA" - sata 300mb/c) and reinstalled windows (xp sp2) with no problems.
Also on mobo gigabyte ga-k8n ultra-9 with silicon raid (150 mb/c) in same 2 raptors in raid 0 and I not had problems.

I hope this help.

Alexander

What had been taking up to 5 minutes to boot up, was reduced to a matter of seconds when we removed a group policy entry that referred to running a login script from a server that had been decommissioned.

Heres my version. Quite lengthy.

Setup:
Windows XP SP2
DFI Lanparty NF2 Ultra B
2x512 Samsung pc3200
AMD athlon 2600+ XP (T-bred B)
Gigabyte 128mb nVidia Geforce fx 5900xt (latest drivers)
Sony dual layer DVDRW
Maxtor IDE 160GB HDD
Enermax 480W noisetaker PSU

Ok first i built the computer with a second hand lanparty board (same model). Installed windows, everything worked fine. The next day, i was getting BSOD at windows startup and auto-restart. Took me a week to figure out it was a motherboard problem, and just to be sure (due to some black markings around the PSU connection to motherboard) i replaced both the motherboard and psu, identical comonents, brand new. Reinstalled windows everything worked, and i didnt have a problem - obviously that was expensive for me, a student i might add.

My mind was finally at rest, and i had a good nights sleep.

Yesterday im happily killing terroist forces on CS: Source, and i get BSOD and physical memory dump. then restart. Holds at Mup.sys. I came to this forum and had a read up on the latest progress. so i reset cmos (with jumpers) and restarted. It loaded thru to an XP scandisk?!! It scanned disk and all checking went fine, dskchk, indexing, blah blah blah...

Left it for the night, as i was knackered. woke up this morning and i cant even get to bios. Power button turns everything on, but i get no action, no picture, and no reaction from keyboard. i dont think its graphics, because my moniter doesnt show "no signal".

I doubt its my power supply or motherboard, both of which are new. i just wish i could get to BIOS to figure it out. Im at college now, missing valuable learning time to figure it out!! lol. any help would be greatly appreciated. I will try to flash the BIOS this evening. Please email me at EMAIL REMOVED with any potential solutions or post it here. im deperate for help.

Many thanks,
FuSion

is it ur monitor? do ur case fans ( if applicable ) spin? do you hear any long beeps?

Its definatly not the moniter or cable as i have checked both. All case fans and lighting work fine. neons

Anything else? any ideas?