Ran into this tonight at a friend's parents' e-Machines computer circa 2002.
1) Reset the BIOS to default settings
2) Removed Modem
3) His hot sister kissed me on the lips.

Yet another victim... this happened after a freeze during SP2 install... thank you Bill. Resetting CMOS worked for me (thanks for that tip!), and after that a system restore after a safe mode boot. Uninstalling SP2 sucks since a trillion drivers need loading after, but at least I'm up again.

I've got a good one - a Windows Media Center Edition PC that appears to stop at mup.sys in the startup.

I've tried a wipe and restore as there was nothing to worrying that could be lost and upon reboot it does exactly the same.

The Media Center Edition of Windows appears to be to blame as it doesn't have a problem with XP Pro...

I did a full install of XP Pro then tried to upgrade to MCE but it just restarted the same problem of "reboot till dead"...

Am gonna try the use of the recovery console to copy mup.sys to the PC from the XP Pro disc but i suspect that it is in fact the very next entry that fails and so i have no idea what that will be...

If i can get to the recovery console can i find out???

Try uninstalling all the PC cards (except of course your video card) and try to reboot. If it boots up, then one by one, start installing your cards back into your PC. I haven't looked too much into what mup.sys does, but I have a feeling it doesn't like some devices, especially some modems. If anyone out there know's exactly what mup.sys' purpose is, I'm curious.

Try uninstalling all the PC cards (except of course your video card) and try to reboot. If it boots up, then one by one, start installing your cards back into your PC. I haven't looked too much into what mup.sys does, but I have a feeling it doesn't like some devices, especially some modems. If anyone out there know's exactly what mup.sys' purpose is, I'm curious.

I built a new comp for the girl and ran into this stopping at mup.sys in safe mode. I pulled my hair out for days trying to fig it out. Anyway I was always able to boot off the XP cd in recovery console and do a chkdsk /p and the system would start up. And work fine or so I thought. Seems I was leaving the CD in the drive, and when ever there was a cd in the drive all was fine, didn't matter what cd it was. After some messing about it turned out to be a problem with the nvidia sw ide driver, going back to the MS XP ide driver fixed all problems.

It has been said time and again: the problem is NOT mup.sys, the problem is whatever file is trying to load AFTER mup.sys. Trying to "fix" mup.sys will not work since there is nothing to fix. You need to find out what file loads AFTER mup.sys. On many machines it is agp440.sys but on my computer it is giveo.sys or something like that. What you are seeing in safe mode is Windows posting the files it is able to load. Since you see mup.sys, that means mup.sys loaded correctly but the file immediately after did not. That is the culprit.

In my case, I am at a lost. Computer load fine until the Win XP logo with the moving bar, Then black screen... Computer is still working but no signal. I tried removing the battery for a while, reinstalling winxp as repair, Bootlog, chkdsk /p then /r when errors were detected... Nothing new.
Asus A7n8x-deluxe
Athlon xp3000+
1HDD Maxtor Sata
I gd dual ram ( 2x512) corsair
Bios 1008
ATI AGP 8x X800 pro with latest driver
One thing I found at this point is that the SATA driver is not Microsoft digitally sign. They are SIL 3112 the driver date is 10/17/2002 and teh # is 1.0.0.22
As we all knows that winxp can be funny sometimes, any body know of replacement drv which are approved? THe last file loaded before the black screen is obviously mup.sys. I just dont know how to find which file come next after the dreaded mup.sys...
Normally I press reset 2 or 3 times and manage to cold boot eventually. If I am already up and running, I can do as many restart as I want without any problems.... Work fine when up. Anybody believe in ghost in the machine? Open to any ideas

Alain RIVET
New-brunswick, Canada

TO Joanne Cutbert...

See this article. This is not everything you request but a good start...

;P

After a full night of trying stuff, thanks to all who participated in this thread, I am very very frustrated

I bought myself a spanking brand new system and attempted a fresh install of Windows XP

MSI K8N Neo4 FI
Antec Sonata II 450 Watt
AMD Athlon 64 Venice 3500+, Socket 939
Arctic Freezer 64 Pro
Apacer 14-in1 card reader Zwart, USB 2.0
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250 GB, 7.200 rpm, 8 MB, SATA II
Gigabyte GV-NX68G256D-B 256 MB, PCI Express x16
NEC ND-4551 16 x, 8 x, 16 x
Corsair ValueSelect DDR SDRAM, 1 GB, PC3200, 400 MHz, Value Serie (2x 512 MB)

I plop in the cd and off she goes. Setup asks for RAID driver, I put in the Nforce4 SATA driver that came with the mainboard. Upon first boot from the HD (still in XP setup mode) the sytem reboots after loading mup.sys.

I tried:
- disabling mup (recovery console)
- chkdsk /r (recovery console)
- Tweaking BIOS ESCD, ACPI, USB, Firewire and a bios reset
(BIOS has latest version from manufactorer)

Now I'm pulling my hair out.

One thing left for me to do is do a repair install and use the latest Nforce4 driver from Nvidia, If that doesn't work I'll go cry in a corner somewhere.

Anyone any more ideas?

thanks!

------
edit:

Ok, for a new install, make sure you use a 100% good copy of the OS. Mine had flaws. I installed WinXP pro SP2 again from a new CD, together with the latest drivers from my mainboard manufactorer (MSI) to access the SATA2 drive (press F6 during install), and now it works!

now comes the dreadful task of reinstalling a bazillion apps .. <sigh> oh well

Hi,

I too have (had!) the freezing at mup.sys problem (and yes, I know it's not a problem with mup.sys itself ). I've spent the last 2 days on and off reading through ALL of the posts and they've been extremely helpful, thank you to one and all, especially the frequent helpers/contributors.

Anyway, I've had this problem for the past couple of weeks. I've tried a couple of things thus far:

1) disabling mup.sys (in the faint hope this simple fix would resolve it) -> Nope
2) removing all pci cards -> nope
3) recovery console, 'R' repair -> runs through fine but doesn't resolve

Last night I thought I'd try the "supersize" repair advised by John Clark 3rd March '05 (page 3 of thread). This was all going well until the second part where windows is finalising installation. It just hangs at "25 minutes to completion". Even left it over night.

So I'm in a predicament now where I had the "mup.sys problem" and now the repair could be being halted by it or something else. And as such I have only half a windows installation. Now I'm completely blind.

I'm going to go home tonight and try the hardware options (CMOS battery, BIOS changes, IDE cable, etc) and see if this helps.

Just wanted to know if anyone else has had problems doing this repair after the "mup.sys problem". And if anyone can guess whether the halt in repair would be due to the same problem.

Should've tried the simple fixes first but had a gut feeling that this would work. Ha!

Thanks

Jon

Ah, some details too I guess:

- 80GB non partitioned (I know, I know, I've learnt my lesson for the future!) Maxtor HD
- AS Rock P4VM8 motherboard
- AMI BIOS

I also had an nvidia graphics card in there, and had installed the drivers for it. Related to other posts in this thread, this seems to be a problem with a few others. Could be my problem I guess.

What's your processor?

Since this is a neverending thread, here's one that *WORKED* on the mup.sys problem yesterday for me:

In the Bios (Intel 915 based) there is a setting for USB 2.0.

Turning 2.0 off and locking it down to USB 1.0 (They use confusing FullSpeed and HighSpeed venacular, whatever 1.0 is for you.) and reboot, ta da....no more mup.sys.

Seems like a hang when the bios has 2.0 support enabled and there is no 2.0 driver at boot time or otherwie a conflict.

Should be Ok once you have it up and running, use the correct and current USB drivers.

I;m confident many other things can hang mup.sys just by what a pain in the 4$$ it is, but here one verified work around in a single instance. Your milage *will* vary, but it sheds some light on the problem.

I got this problem on my laptop I've been trying to reinstall XP on without an optical drive. Yes, I enjoy a challenge! Anyway, with no optical drive I basically pulled the hard drive out of my laptop, stuck a laptop to IDE converter cable on it, installed it in my desktop, installed XP to it, patched it to SP2, threw it back in my laptop, and powered it on. Not surprisingly, it didn't work. Every single time it boots it locks right before the Windows XP loading screen, and through safe mode it locks up on "mup.sys". The earliest mentioned problem (different keyboard I think) sounds promising.
Oh yeah, I can't really use the ASR or other cd-dependant restoration utilities on the laptop becuase it's sans optical drive. That's a whole 'nother story.

Averatec 5110p
512mb ram, 40gig Hitachi drive, empty optical bay

David:

Your situation is a known condition with WinXP. See my reply on p. 9 of this thread, on Aug 9 at 1:55pm. Bottom line: You *must* perform the WinXP installation on the machine you want to use WinXP on, because the install process loads drivers and system components specific to the hardware it's being installed on (mobo, CPU, etc.).

You can run into the same problem you're having if you start with a machine that's running XP fine, and then change the CPU or mobo. It won't boot, and you'll have to do a "repair install" of XP to pick up the correct drivers for the new hardware without losing any other data or installed applications.

The good news is that there's an easy way for you to get out of your current pickle. The bad news is you'll need to find an optical drive you can borrow, because you'll need to perform such a "repair installation" of WinXP on your laptop: http://www.theeldergeek.com/replace_motherboard.htm

It doesn't help you today, but if you ever want to install XP on a machine with no optical drive in the future, but the machine can be networked to another machine with an optical drive, you can copy the CD contents to the install machine's hard drive and execute the setup from there. (Of course you can't reformat the hard drive during the setup process if you go this route, and you have to have a machine that can successfully boot in the first place...)

Jim

*Long Post Warning*

Ok, I, like many others have been having problems with XP hanging after loading mup.sys (i was quite relieved and worried at the same time to immediatly find a 400 post thread about the same problem i had (i was expecting 0 hits putting "mup.sys" into google)

I'll just go ahead and start from the beginning to make things easy....

I buy a new computer for my 18th birthday, ordering all the parts through Newegg (had some maaaaajor haedaches getting the parts I ordered, but thats a rant for another time). Here's what I got:

eVGA NForce 4 SLi Mobo
AMD 64 3700+
eVGA GeForce 7800GT
1gb (512x2) Corsair XMS PC3200 RAM
250gb SATA Samsung HD
Lite-ON DVD Burner
Enermax Noisetaker 420W PSU
Antec P-180 Case

After an initial install of a slightly less then legitimate copy of XP Pro (intended as a temporary solution until I could gather the cash to buy my own copy, so don't worry, I'm not some free-loading pirate, but we'll just leave all that at that) I would get a BSOD about 1 second after the splash screen showed up. I didn't even bother trying to reinstall the less than legitimate copy of XP Pro, I just said "You know, this isn't really worth the trouble, I'll just wait another week for my paycheck"

Fast forward 3 days and the alternator in my car decides that it would be a great time to stop working so there goes a few weeks of paychecks.... *grumblegrumble*

Since I'm just itching to use my brand new comp, I use the XP disk that came with my few year old Dell to install XP home. This works for about a week, but while I was at a LAN party, I started getting a BSOD about 20 minutes after boot. This happened <i>every time</i> I tried to re-boot. I'm sure my computer was thinking "Hmmmm... he's having fun, I need to do something about that... IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL!!!!!!!!" Me being my impatient self decided it'd spend all of 20 minutes trying to troubleshoot before it resorted to a reformat and reinstall (it didnt bother me at the time as all I had on my computer was XP, World of Warcraft, and Age of Empires 3)

So I reformat and reinstall and all goes well for about a week, then I for whatever reason check out my hard drive...

"Ok... looks good... Wow, I've used up 25% of my hard drive already??!?! Well, theres about 30 out of.... 137g!?!?! WTF! Thats a 250gb hard drive in there!!"

"No I'm not!!! I auto-detect at 137gb!! I like making people miserable"

"I'm talking to my hard drive!! I must be frustrated!"

*ahem* Anywho... after a little digging around on MS' knowledge base I discover all the wonderous things that are SATA drives, SP2, and 48-bit LBA. I follow all the instructions and get it fixed, or so I think. All goes well, or so I think.

Another week after that incident, I'm at another LAN (yeah, I go to them like every week... two on this particular 3-day president's day weekend) and I'm happily killing mobs and doing fetch-quests in World of Warcraft to catch up with my friends' level. We blow the circuit breaker in the course of the night, this doesn't seem to have any effect on my computer, but I'd rather not completly rule it out.... All goes well until I come home and set my comp back up.

I boot up, and it hangs at the splash screen (I should mention that ever since I reinstalled windows the 2nd time (post-20-minute BSODs) windows has loaded EXTREMLY slowly. Like, it takes about 5 minutes to boot. I attributed this to issues with the 48-bit LBA stuff and thought nothing of it.) After much swearing and whatnot I try again. Same result. After more sleep-deprivation induced rage, I try to boot into safe mode aaaaaaaannddd.....

it hangs after it loads MUP.SYS At this point I'm thinking S***, I must have given the hard-drive too big of a bump on the ride home. After trying every single suggested fix on this thread ((which is an absolute god-send, these are incredible forums) I went through all the fixes on one of the "compilation posts" and any others I could find after reading through all 20 pages of this thread) And as you can guess, none of them worked. Not resetting the CMOS, reseting the EBSC (i think thats it, the mobo device saving dealy, forgive my ignorance) switching out the cables, disabling MUP.SYS, deleting ntbtlog.txt, running chkdsk /p and /r, and finally doing a windows recovery install (which worked for exactly 1 boot, then returned to the problem I had before). After doing ALL of these things (and some otheres I'm sure I forgot to mention), I'm sitting in front of my computer, absolutly fuming from frustration when I decide to do somethign to relieve my stress.

I play Guitar Hero.

For those of you who don't know what it is, you should check it out (plug it into any search engine and you should be able to find it rather easily) It's the most fun I've ever had playing a video game. After the first round of playing Bark at the Moon on expert, I get a score of 137*** (don't remember the lsat few digits) and suddenly I have a revelation that went soemthing like...

"137gb! Holy S***! I was right around there in disk space used when I went to the LAN. I installed two games while at the LAN! Some guy I can't remember siad that Windows will write over random protions of the disk if you go over the 137gb limit and still have issues with 48bit LBA! WOOHOO!!!! I think I finally figured this stupid problem out!"

And as of right now, I am doing a recovery install to hopefully get one boot out of my machine again so I can have a chance to copy all the files I need over to a USB hard drive. Once I get that done, I'm just going to do a complete reformat and reinstall with the copy of XP I just bought. Hopefully all goes well and my extraordinarily bad luck will come to an end. I'll post back here when all is said and done to tell you if it all works out or not (and probably a summary of what I did to fic it so you wont have to read through this mammoth post (took me 40 minutes to type!!!).

*phew*

Feels good to solve a problem thats been driving you crazy. Probably shouldn't get so c**ky just yet though... Wish me luck and thanks for all the tips in this thread!

Windows XP, SP2 w/AMD 1800+.

My system started stalling at mup.sys as well one day. I didn't make any changes the previous day. My little sister was playing SIMS and that was it. I couldn't get into Windows, Safe Mode w/Networking or even Safe Mode w/o Networking. I was only able to get into Safemode w/Command Prompt. Regardless, I disabled APIC in BIOS, no change. I re-enabled it, no change. I disabled "Assign IRQ to USB" and that worked. I went back and enabled it, and it's still working. So whatever the hell it was, it's working now. Probably related to the USB as some dude mentioned earlier.

Anybody please help me! I am going to be crazy because of freezing at MUP.sys

My Com configuration is:

- MAINBOARD: 915 GAV, On sound AC's 97, VGA on board with PCI Express slot, support Hyper threading tech
- CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz
- VIDEO: GIGABYTE RADEON X600PRO 128MB (replaced VGA on board)
- RAM: 512 MB Ram running DUAL CPU MODE
- HDD: SATA SAMSUNG 80GB, ATA 20GB QUANTUM
- SCSI CARD SUPPORT CD RW
- CD RW YAMAHA 16/32/16
- DVD LG 52X
- NIC 10MB PLANET

It has run powerfully, smoothly for over 1 years. Never got problem until a day, I installed 2 DDR2(256mb) PC3200 Bus 400,that up my computer to 1GB ram Dual Channel Mode - Hyper threading Enable.
After installed 2 DDR, the Windows XP running normally but cannot detect NIC. So I can't access the Internet or LAN neither.
I tried to replugged but no work. I try other NIC (100MB REALTEX). Atfer that the Windows couldn't loggin. It stopped at Mup.sys.
I try anyway that everybody give in this thread such as:

+ Remove the Battery to clear the CMOS, reset BIOS by Jumper
+ Unplugged two new DDR, unplugged any equipment except my main HDD SATA 80GB
+ Boot from CD to enter the repair console but when go the step "starting the setup" the com was hanging.
+ Install new WindowsXP, 2000,2003, the same freezing at "starting the setup"
+ Install Windows 98se, after all the installion steps, the freezing at the final step "Getting to start Windows"
+ I try to flash the BIOS by http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Product_Filter.asp?ProductID=441 for correct the revision step. But It doesn't support my CPU Intel Pentium 3.0GHz. Also It provide the Information:

CPU Revision: E
Level 1 Data Cahe: 128Kb
Level 2 : 1M


All no work! Oh my god! (

Please help me, if not I can go mad!!!

I know that one issue that will bring up mup.sys is related to the bios support for USB 2.0 and not having a 2.0 driver at startup time.

I'd start by straight disabling anything USB in the BIOS and seeing if you can get closer to a normal boot and go from there.

This is just one confirmed mup.sys senario I'm familiar with first hand and seen documentation on it for an Issue I ran into. I can speculate on many other somewhat related things about mup.sys though.

If the intuitive troubleshooting fails, I'd go into brute force mode, for me this is:

Removing and disabling everything not absolutly needed to get the system running. (IE, 1 processor, 1 Stick of memory and 1 video, 1 HD) and unplug and remove everything else....if you still having issues, under clocking the system as well. If it's stable, that's great, otherwise start with fresh MB/Video drivers and a BIOS flash. Something basic is not hooking right.

Adding things one at a time until you start having issues will help narrow down the culprit(s).