Here is my solution to the MUP.sys hanging on startup. System config, all brandnew hardware except CD-ROM drive (crdom is a Kenwood ZEN multibeam) MB Epox 9NDA3+, AMD3000, Cricial Ballistix Tracer x2 512, Hitachi SATA 80GB x2 configured as RAID 0, Giga-Byte N66T128D graphics card. Anyway I installed the OS, it runs through the BIOS quick and then hangs for 30seconds on the splash screen with the rolling bar. I rebooted and hit F8 and used Safe mode and found the last file loaded (or maybe it was hanging on loading) was MUP.SYS I tried re-installing the OS no luck. Loaded BIOS failsafe no luck. Then I unplugged the CD-ROM drive and now it boots like it should without hanging. I can warm boot the PC in just under a minute without delays. Maybe I can upgrade the firmware on the CDROM drive and use it after all, but I'll probably buy a DVD-Burner, I have an excuse now
P.S. No ServicePack applied infact just the WindowsXP Pro OS, no video drivers just VGA, no sound, etc...
I hope this helps, It does seem like XP possibly has some trouble with hardware. But then I didn't check the hardware list to see if the Kenwood drive was supported. ---- John ------

My nights with mup.sys....

Dear all,

I encountered the mup.sys 3 times. My nerves just have a kind of peace now.....

This story starts with a modest PC I built myself with an ASrock K7S8 mobo + Athlon XP 2400+ 2GHz + SDRAM 256MPc3200F333+512MPc3200F with Master HD Maxtor and a IDE slave +Terratec Phase 22 sound card +
NVDIA Geforce 5200 as Graphic card. The OS was a W2KPro single partition.

First apparition: One day I had the good idea to install the W2K SP4....
Then mup.sys ....
I reformated my hard disks from another mobo with install cd roms. I did two partitions one W2K Pro (without SP4) and the other XPPro SP2 as Primary.

Second apparition:
One week of peace then Mup.sys re-appeard.....after having installed NVDIA drivers on XP (?)
I tried to boot on the W2K partition...impossible.
I then reseted the BIOS by removing the CMOS battery. The boot on W2K authorized me to do a check disk and then authorized the boot on the W2K and the boot on the XP Cd rom to repair the XP partition.... The nightmare persists the system still cannot find the checkdisk.out (sounds like that....) on the XP boot and stops after the Windows XP first logon screen.
I then reformated the XP part. And then...of course it boots ;-)

3 days after..... Third apparition:
Trying to update my soundcard drivers...god.....again a crash.
Hello back mup.sys !!!!!
Goodness I could have thrown at the window all this windy noisy gaz factory under my desk....with all theses wires and this metal stuff.
I noticed in the BIOS, related to my 2 SDRAM PC3200 that my 512M (chips samsung no name) had a frequency of 200 whereas the 256M no name had a frequency of 333. The mobo is not guaranteed with this 200. But why did it worked on W2K without any problems during 6 months ?

I removed the 512 RAM......
then my PC boot again on the W2K part and I could repair the XP part without formating again.

I have now a good period of stability.
But who said mup.sys was an old memory ? I may need a bigger boat ?
One day maybe he'll be back.....
I didn't install the NVDIA drivers on XP partition and put the 512M in my fridge.
That's also can explain ?

I have a suggestion with Win XP SP2. To add the prefix RE- in front this famous bottom left corner on my screen where it's written Demarrer for frenchies.
My next high tech generation OS will have the button renamed RE-START !!!!
We shouldn't pay for that ! (joke) Maybe that's linked to mup.sys ?

Thanks mup.sys.
David

Problem Solved!!!

Boot with your Windows XP Disc and select the "R" option for the System Recovery Console. Once in there type "chkdsk /p" hit "Enter" and it'll fix it.

I had the same problem, with my machine. My config was XP Pro Sp2, AMD Athalon 1.2, 256m RAM, ATI 7500 all in wonder..the problem appeared when i installed SP2.

i got a new machine, new everything (top to bottom) it was running fine for a day without SP2. As soon as i installed SP2, i got the mup.sys error and the reboot from hell. SP2 also complained about my new video driver, the SAPPHIRE, ATI 7600, 256m RAM.

Since then, i've un-installed XP2 and everything is fine once again. I was a MSFT fan up until this problem. Im thinking of switching to linux, cause im frustrated with the multiple patches, service packs, hot fixes and the instability issues with MSFT software these days. C'mon bill don't let us down.

I've upgraded to a 64-bit AMD system, and have just installed WinXP. I've also been getting this failure to load at mup.sys, however for me it happens when I try to install any drivers to run my Radeon 9000 graphics card. If I load back to a previous install, thus uninstalling the graphics drivers, it works fine...however no graphics is no way to game.

So, I tried the chkdsk /p route, no go. I tried the re-installing the OS, and installing the drivers before installing SP2 for XP, and that didn't work either...which means to me that SP2 has nothing to do with this specific problem. My entire system, save the m-board and processor is the same, though, so I'm wondering of it's a problem with Radeon drivers and 64-bit motherboard bios...but who knows.

Any ideas are welcome. It sucks when you go from a slow system to a faster system, and end up dead instead of mearly crippled...heh

Dear all,

after nights of fights don't loose your energy for future.

Let's install the Windows recovery console when you are on the tranquility sea of course...
When the Pacific ocean big waves of mup.sys will rush on you, just boot on the recovery console (if this boot fails..restart and just push F8 while the Recovery console shows windows progress bar....)
Choose the number of your XP primary disk.
Let's do a chkdsk /p then a chkdsk /r.
It takes something like 15 to 20 min on my 80 G HD....then u can boot safely after a restart.
But mup.sys will come back .....never forget that....
This is just a way of getting around of it but not destroying it.

One day will come when mup.sys is an old nightmare....

Cheers.

Got it fixed. Was apparently a conflict with my serial ata drivers, as I'm trying to use a new serial ata harddrive as my primary drive, with ide drives as slaves. The 64-bit motherboard by chaintech I have however did not want to use the serial ata drivers. I had to get an updated bios from chaintech, as well as change it so it would not search for 8x agp. Supposedly the Radeon cards have conflicts with serial ata as well. At any rate, it's fixed up now and runnin' like a champ.

Hi. I have a very similar problome....i didnt bother to read the whole posting on this but in my case it goes something like this

I have a 2xhdd, a DVD drive and a CD-rw, the CD-rw drive has been unpluged for a very long time, god knows what I have done while it was that why. I decided to re-plug it and expected no error but than windows decidest that it would be fun to stop in the middle of the booting, so i start in safe mode and see this Mup.sys, like someone else i google it and find this post. Any idea on how too fix this thing(btw. if I unplug the drive again Window starts normaly with no errors)

Ok, I have a corroborating story. LOTS of problems post SP2 with a system with an old CR-RW in it (an old system too -- P733 or thereabouts).

I've found that I *can* get it to reboot, reliably, so long as there is a CD -- any CD -- in the drive. Otherwise hangville.

I guess it will work ok if I disconnect the drive, and maybe I'll just replace it. One day <g>.

I don't want to tell you how many different magical things I tried until I realised there was a correlation between "and I put the XP disk back in and suddenly it worked again"!

I have also experienced this problem.

I believe the problem to be hardware related and nothing at all to do with MUP.SYS.

The MUP.SYS driver just happens to be the last one to load before Windows starts allocating resources and
starting services, the fact that the MUP.SYS line appears on the screen during a Debug boot means that
this driver successfully loaded. If you unload this driver to prevent it from being started Windows will just
appear to stop at the previous one and so on...

Because this is the very last driver to be loaded before Windows allocates resources and starts services this
means that the problem you have could be virtually anywhere, thats why this forum lists so many diferent
apparent fixes for what appears to be the same problem, thats because you all have a diferent problem.

My particular system is a Shuttle SN85G4 with AMD 64 3400 CPU and an AIW 9800SE graphics card, now
this graphics card is of the type that requires an additional power supply via a standard 5.25" device power
connector, like so many cards do now. Anyway to cut a long story short you cant realy use these cards
in a Shuttle SN85G4 system because the power supply is about 10W short of what is required on boot up. But you can get around this by fitting an external switch so that the additional power is only applied after
the initial boot/POST sequence is complete. The problem I had was that the switch was faulty and the
additional power line to the graphics card was dropping out just after Widnows starts to load drivers, so
although the Radeon driver was loading successfully, when Windows asks it to do something major, like
switch to a certain mode, well good night nurse...

Replaced the switch and all OK.

If anyone would like details of the Shuttle SN85G4 graphics card hardware fix then please visit the link
http://www.entsoft.co.uk/html/pc_hardware.html#Problems

I had a problem along these lines this morning:

When I arrived to work this monday morning, my machine was powered off. I never power off my machine over th weekend (in case I need remote access to it) so I thought we had a power outage.

When I turned it on, it got to the Windows loading screen, then the screen went black, and nothing came up. Not sure what to think at this point, I tried the last known good settings, which yielded the same results. I then tried safe mode, which loaded to mups.sys, which led me here (via google).

As I sat here going thru the replies and questions, the machine finally began to bring up safe mode. Still no desktop or icons yet, but I had a mouse cursor. It took a good 10 minutes to get here. It was at that point in my reading that a user made a reference to usb 2.0. I removed my usb key from the machine and the icons came right up. I rebooted back into normal mode and the machine started immediately.

So yeah, remove any usb storage devices before booting to see if it helps. I have an avertv usb device still ataached with no problems...

Hope this helps...

I had the same problem described as far as the machine being in a reboot loop. This just kind of happened "all of the sudden", not after doing any updates or hardware changes. I have been running sp2 for quite some time with no problems. This pc stays on all the time, unless we have a bad thunderstorm. I just happened to walk into my office and see that the pc kept rebooting itself over and over. When I tried to boot into safe mode, it would hang, then restart at mpu.sys.

Prior to this happening, the computer started to "lock up" with no response even to ctrl-alt-del. I did a defrag, virus-scan (norton) and a scan using sypbot, and all seemed well. I left the computer running with nobody logged in, as I usually do, and a few hours later the reboot-loop appeared.

To "fix" the problem, I booted with my xp cd using the recovery console to replace mup.sys with a copy from a working system. The pc then booted up, and windows did an automatic chkdsk and repaired errors. After doing so, no more problems. I then updated my antivirus software, and it did find a file that was a threat. It is a piece of adware with the filename disp800.exe which is found in C:\program files\MyPoints_PointAlert\. I am not sure if this was the culprit or not, but after deleting it following the instructions on symantec's website, I have had no more problems.

I've been fighting this problem for a couple of weeks (Recap: very slow boot--stays on Windows logo screen with moving dots for over an hour! Safe mode boot shows "Mup.sys" as the last file loaded before the "hang"). I don't reboot very often, so I'm not sure exactly when the problem was introduced. I know it was after I installed SP2, but I don't know if that had anything to do with the problem occurring.

Finally, I got the bright idea to select the "Boot Logging" option after hitting F8 during startup. After waiting nearly an hour and a half for the boot to complete, I checked the ntbtlog.txt file, which was 256K big, and there were literally hundreds (maybe thousands--I didn't count) of repeated "Did not load driver" entries. Pretty much all my drivers "did not load", and they "did not load" over and over again. Interspersed throughout the log were occasional "loaded driver so-and-so" entries, so I guess over time it eventually loaded what it needed to. I never noticed any problems with my system once it actually managed to get through that tedious boot process.

When investigating boot logging on microsoft.com's knowledge base, I found a reference to a tool called "System File Checker". It goes through and verifies the protected system files and will restore them from your original WinXP install CD if required. Took about 30 minutes to run, and it hit the CD-ROM a LOT. After it was done, though, I was able to reboot just fine.

The relevant MS KB pages are:
http://tinyurl.com/33tj7 and
http://tinyurl.com/cqe5n

(the long links are http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/al...l_rpsc.asp
and
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/al...l_lkth.asp
if you don't trust my tinyurls)

My System Properties screen still says I'm running SP2. Dunno if I overwrote any important SP2 files with older versions by doing what I did...

Jim

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.

Hi All, it appears that this forum has exhausted all avenues, with mulitple fixes etc. And I thank you all for your info all of you have taken the time to share.

I had this problem where my PC failed apon bootup at the Mup.sys file, and did a google search which lead me here. Now, I haven't taken the time to read all posts, however, the ones i read certainly helped me. I'm just a lonely photographer (Anyone got a wedding coming up soon and want a photographer for it , preferably Sydney NSW Australia based???). Anyway, I'm not that technical, although photography does require one to be rather fimiliar with computers/scanners and the like.

For anyone else who might encounter this problem, here is what I did to RECTIFY this problem.

Bacground, this problem started when my powersupply blew. I replaced the supply (actually bought a new case), and installed everything back into this new case. The computer then booted up fine, although occasionally it would fail. When I then started up again in 'safe mode' I could see that most of the time (although not all the time), it was failing on Mup.sys. This lead me to do a google search, and to my surprise, there appeared to be a lot of people with the same problem.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I tried flashing the CMOS, restoring it to a failsafe config, etc, tried replacing HD cables, CMOS batteries etc... Nothing worked.

What did, was a simple re install of windows (I did not loose my existing files/setups etc), all were intact.

This is how i did it. I installed my windows XP CD into the CDROM drive, madesure in my CMOS settings, that the computer would try the CDROM before trying the Harddrive and then rebooted. WinXF recovery came up, I selected to install windows, it then told me it found an existing installation of windows and asked me if I wanted to re-install. I answered yet. it took approx 40 mins, however this fixed the failed booting problem.

I noticed however that I was getting the occasional bad file message, so I ran cmd (start run, type cmd, enter) this is the command prompt, similar to old DOS, In this window, I typed chkdsk /F c: . This took approx 2 hours, however it found corrupted files etc. After chkdsk, all seemed Ok, it corrected, and fixed the corrupt files, and the system has been fine since.

Here is my BLOG on the trouble
http://www.stephenmorton.com.au/index.php?section=5

Anyway, I hope someone finds this information useful, and thankyou to all those who game me the advice to get to where I am now (thise who took the time to post advice in this forum).

Regards,

Stephen Morton
sm@stephenmorton.com.au
http://www.stephenmorton.com.au

Right

I had the same mup.sys load then freeze problem as most here.

Keep in mind this machine was running XP Pro for 3 years with not one problem at all & it's been a gaming machine all that time and i have been the only one who ever installed software on it . OH YEAH SP2 = BAD NEWS

I was out one night and a so called friend install Fire warrior and that was the end of that as they say.

Now un-installing it did not help 1 bit {bitch}. I work with all kinds of hardware every day and why fire warrior would f**k up my board bios in very puzzling.

BUT removing the bios battery for a few minutes did the job. The only thing I can think of is that if the bios virus was turned on then what ever F warrior did would have shown up in the form of a BIG red warning screen from the bios during install.


So to all here REMOVE the bios battery, don't just reset it in the bios screen.


best of luck every one

Same mup.sys problem here. Last week I had a bad crash and had to press the Reset button on my compy, which lead to some HD corruption and I had to re-install Norton. Anyway, about 2 weeks go by with no problem, then all of a sudden I am getting the mup.sys freeze. I find this thread like the rest of you. I do the disk scan and repair thing and now everything is working again. Good thing I didn't need to spend more than about 1/2 hour with this problem. My other comps all run linux (for a reason).

Hi All, yip had a similar problem with a client's computer, which in turn did not allow XP to boot, kept "freezing at the MUP.sys" point. Did some investigating and managed to find the source of the problem by pressing F8 and selecting the VGA option. Came up with a blue screen after that saying the software hive was corrupt. Came across this article from microsoft to restore a corrupt registry -
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545
once I had got past step 1 rebooted the machine, it prompted me to activate windows, which I found out they had never done. Followed the steps all the way through and had a working system after 15 min!
So the casue could be one of two things, a corrupt registry which may relate to hard drive problems etc or the failure to activate windows in time.

Hiya all tonight I run into this problem myself same issue on my girlfriends laptop however it seems different in some comparsons so my friends I shall explain.

She was using it to network to my pc via our SACM ( cable modem from ntl 2mb ) it runs into her laptop via usb and then ethernet to my pc from her laptop shes in Yahoo and got a virus ( she stupidly downloaded something from a then trusted friend) and it gave her a virus which lodged into system32 directory called system.exe this was a pest spamming her msn yahoo icq etc.

I removed this virus and we thought was all clear until tonight, then her laptop froze at Yahoo when she tried to open it and would not move a inch on anything HD light just bright on.

We then hard rebooted and got the normal mup.sys boot upto or the Windows GUI depending on wether I am in safe mode or not.

I then decided to leave it on the Windows GUI bootscreen while I set this pc to run off the ethernet from the modem.

After getting my pizza delivered for the long night ahead getting this thing working I noticed something after about 30minutes on the Bootscreen for windows it went into scandisk ( windows xp home sp2 ) and was scanning system32, and finding alot and I mean over 100 bad clusters and fixing them I hope this works and fixes the issue.

IF so I shall report it here for you all also.

Just got the mup issue.
After changing my 2nd CD Drive for a new one the system was hanging on the mup.sys file in safe mode.

So I thought that the new CD drive was the issue and indeed it was. The 2nd CD drive
had jum stting on SLAVE. The one I had just put in was on MASTER. So switching the jump seeting to SLAVE got my problem solved. I guess this was causing an IDE conflict.

I thought sharing this so it may turn some on lights for any of you dealing with this issue.

JM