Hello, a friend has te same problem in his notebook with Windows Media Center.
He installed a second antivirus in a mistake; when he rebooting the computer show the brand of the manufacturer and the screen put black.

I try to start in safe mode and it stop in the mpu.sys file, in windows\system32\drivers
I enter in recovering console and the system cannot find this file, so i understand the file is created when the notebook load others system files, so finally i reinstalled Windows Media.

[SPANISH-ESPAÑOL]

Hola, un amigo de mi cuñado instaló por error un segundo antivirus en su portátil, con Windows Media Center.
Al reiniciar le aparece el logo del fabricante y la pantalla se queda en negro.
Intenté arrancar en modo seguro y el sistema se deteneía al cargar el archivo mpu.sys, en Windows\System32\Drivers.
Entré con la Consola de Recuperación, pero al buscar el archivo no lo encontraba, por lo que entiendo que se crea al cargar otros archivos del sistema.
Al final la única solución que le encuentro es la de reinstalar Windows Media Center.

Trizzo Smith said:


Wow, it's pretty rare that it is actually a bonafide hardware issue, and this is the first time I've seen a CPU replacement fix it, but as you say, it can be pretty much anything.

That's saying quite a bit...I was at HP for 6 years and a lead on supporting almost 1/4 million users for the military, first for everything!

Still, for the benefit of others, again, USB and FIREWIRE drivers, and the lack thereof, are the single biggest culprit for the mup.sys problem in my experience. So turning off all the ports and devices you cab and deleting the OEM*.INFs and OEM*.PNFs (in reality, the .inf's only is enough) as described earlier.

What (most often, lets throw in all the caveats) that windows loads up a generice driver for an IO device that is incorrect. Once it assigns in incorrect driver to a device, it's hard to get it to move off of it. You can "update" the driver with the manufactures disk by navigating to the .INF on it, but windows will probably complain that it's the wrong driver (even when it isn't) and also force you to go looking for components by hand.

So, It's easier for an end user to kill off the install information and start over with the .INF method.

I don't do IT anymore, and don't really miss it....

Kevin Van said: There are actually many examples of "bonafide hardware issues" causing this problem documented throughout this thread.

I cringe whenever I see a post from someone in this thread who suggests what they think is the most likely generic culprit. No one here has made any scientific survey to determine which causes are more or less likely than others.

Here is a partial list of problems (with solutions in parentheses) that have been identified as causing the "Safe Mode boot sequence hangs after loading mup.sys" failure signature (many of these were reported by several users):

- Registry entry pointing to a non-existent keyboard (clear bad registry entry)

- Conflicts between XP Service Pack 2 and certain hardware and/or drivers (revert to XP SP1 or change out the offending hardware (probably no longer an issue as compatible drivers are almost certainly available by now))

- Unspecified HDD media problem (fixed by running "chkdsk /p" via Recovery Console)

- CMOS setting problem (clear CMOS settings back to defaults)

- Bad IDE cable (replace the cable)

- APIC / Power Management not enabled in BIOS (enable APIC / Power Management in BIOS)

- nVidia IDE driver problem (remove the driver and let Windows' default IDE driver do the job)

- Cause unknown (reload Windows using Repair Install option)

- User follows improper procedure to upgrade motherboard or CPU on WinXP system (reload Windows using Repair Install option)

- Bad memory module (replace bad memory module)

- BIOS drivers not compatible with new hardware attached to motherboard (update BIOS drivers or remove offending hardware)

These are all identified in the first 4 pages of this thread, before I made my first post here two years ago. There are 30 more pages of similar comments, and many causes/solutions included in those pages that I have not captured here.

I'd suggest that your experience (that this problem is usually related to USB or Firewire drivers) is not consistent with the dozens of other people who have posted in this thread over the years, and that you do future readers a disservice by ignoring the many, many other causes that have been identified throughout this thread.

Jim Runkey said:

I did not mean to imply that that was the only cause, back in March 2006 I pretty much stated that any interface can be at fault, and maybe I should have stated that. We've both been on this forum for almost the same amount of time and have seen many facets to this issue.

But it has been my expeience that this is in fact an OS flaw, more often than not a driver/HAL/or some similar issue and not actually defective hardware. I wonder how much hardware has been swapped out because cause of this crappy OS flaw that was in fact good but fixed the problem becuse in doing so, the right bit got flipped, etc.

Sure, real hardware faults can cause this as well, and sometimes it'll take brute force to figure it out. I posted a method (boot minimally and start adding devices one by one), maybe around page 20 or 21 of this thread.

As for the ports being likely culprits, I stand by it from first hand experience. They are, after all, the most common hardware changes that most users ever make to their systems. Is it exclusively the cause? Of course not.

Thanks for the clarification.

** Factory installed WinXP Home SP2 with HP's System Recovery partition on same HD **

Ok, so how 'bout an issue with a HP Pavilion dv6058cl? Same "mup.sys" hang-up as others on this post.

Have had this laptop for 9 mos, worked great. About a month back, my audio driver kept on corrupting and I would lose audio from time-to-time. I'd uninstall and re-install it and that would solve the issue. Finally it got to the point where audio was off continuously.

Next came a 3-beep POST error (1 long, 2 short). My laptop would not boot at all. No video (LCD nor external VGA monitor), but there was power (AC and Battery) and power & multi-media lights. This was intermittent also, then became the constant issue for several days.

In order to recover data I needed immediately, I removed the SATA HD from the laptop and plugged it into a Dell laptop. Dell laptop booted upto a certain point in Windows but then would hang. I plugged the HD back into the HP and tried boot-up. It began to boot and then restarted itself like it did on the Dell laptop!

Finally called HP and they said it was a hardware issue with the laptop. I kept the HD to recover data and HP received the laptop. They fixed it, but never stated exactly what was wrong or replaced (I suspect it was a motherboard swap?). I noticed the CD/DVD burner does not seat properly when pushed closed and a CD is being read (I get a file not found error). So I have to apply gentle pressure to the drive to ensure CD is properly read.

Anyway, the laptop no longer has the 3-beep issue, but Windows refuses to boot as it hangs at the "mup.sys" load. I've done a system recovery of the OS from the HP's recovery partition (around 10 GBs) from the same HD. This ensures a clean (default) OS install on the user (C partition. But the same hang-up issue persists.

I'm not giving up -- but I'm certainly very tired of this annoying pattern. Can anyone please help?! THANK YOU!

M H said:

That model has a pretty well known problems with the wireless and hibrination modes.

I'd try upgrading the BIOs first (and get all the newest drivers you can while you are there), reboot

In the bios, I'd turn off everything you do not absolutely need (usb, wireless, all power saving, etc)

Hit F8 and boot into safe mode (hope it works, keep disabling things in BIOs until untili can)

Uninstall potential offending devices especially audio and wireless, APIC (and anything else seemingly power related).

In /windows/inf and windows/inf/other I'd kill off (or copy someplace safe) all OEM*.*

Reboot normally and feed it new drivers as it ask for them. No short cuts, reboot when it wants to.

Thanks for the tips Kevin

Phoenix BIOS on this laptop doesn't give any options to turn off items (ie. usb, firewire, wireless, sound, etc). I do have options to re-arrange boot sequence, the # of seconds of pause to press ESC or F10 keys, and presence of Network and Floppy boot-up option. In addition to these, there are the options to change date/time and BIOS passwords. I have yet to see any more granular settings in this BIOS.

Does anyone know if this laptop BIOS provides access to more granular user settings?

The physical wireless switch is set to "off". I'm simply trying to reboot with an internal HD (not anything external via usb/firewire/esata, etc). There are no floppy drive nor network cables attached. I ran a CHKDSK command by placing the laptop's HD into an external enclosure and hooking it up to another XP SP2 workstation. After 3+ hours of scanning, results reveal 0 KB of "bad sectors" and no error reported whatsoever.

Another good day lost with an HP product.

HUmmm, I hate neutered bios's (biosii? Biosis?) Try F1 and F10, sometimes F10 will give more options on some bios...if you have a CLEAR CMOS or ESCD option, invoke it after you have copied down any bios settings to paper.

Based on a problem like this in a dv4000 series, have you tried this:

Remove power cord

Remove battery

Remove CDROM Details here:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00649956&...mp;lang=en

Press power button (with no cdrom, battery or cord attached, we're doing it on purpose this way.)

Still, without battery or cdrom, attach power cord and try to boot, anything different?

Try Safe Mode as well.

Either way, it's be a good time to update the BIOS, there has been an issue where apparently the CDROM has messed up the NVRAM (ESCD) before.

I have a Compaq Presario B3800 with XP Pro as a preload. I was trying to install my wireless cable modem and after loading the USB drivers for the wireless USB stick...and a reboot...it all went pearshaped. Meaning it won't boot...it goes to the Win screen and coloured bars scroll twice and it loops. Safe mode etc result in a freeze.

I too have the neutered Pheonix BIOS and can't do anything except play with time, date and boot order. System is refusing to boot from CD with XP in it.

I saw suggestions to "flash" or upgrade BIOS etc. How would I do this? I CANNOT lose the data on my HD...I need my sysem to work again. Any help is truly appreciated.

hello all

repaired my myp.sys problem with recovery cd's (dvd's) console:

chkdsk c: \f

huh!

Just bought a new mobo/cpu/mem combo, and i basically just wiped an extra hd i had and installed xp. runs fine with the onboard video... so i update to sp2
reboots on the agp card. so, i take it out and update everything.
still doesnt boot with agp card. check everything, it all looks normal.
i take sp2 off and BAM!
B. S. O (Crap!) D.
Isnt xp supposed to be bsod immune?
XD I always seem to find that nasty lil pos.
I've gotten it many a time, in my 8 hours of working on it the night before work... seems this time it's saying " bad_system_config_info. " for a second time in my bsod runs.
biostar k8m800mam2 with an amd 64 3500+, and i'm trying to put an ati x1050 in there.
it's been giving me hell, so i'm going to work and fussing with it about 3est.
leave me something nice so i can get my pc running, onegai? ;.;
- sean

Jim Runkey said:

Dude --THANK YOU (and I mean that to all who've developed this answer over the years.) After 3 hours of recovery console-ing, manually restoring registry files, and putting a sailor to shame with my language... this was the fix for me.

To anyone else out there who puts in an XP SP2 install CD, then decides, "Nah, I'll do it later" and F3 exits out and finds their XP won't boot -- this was the fix. I don't know if it was just bad timing and I had flubbed the hard drive, or if recycling my parallel port scanner did it. But, this thread got me going.

After doing some research on Chkdsk /P, I understand that the command is diagnostic only, and certainly didn't fix my problem. However, the thread did get me thinking about peripherals and hardware causing the problem, and I'm fairly convinced it was my circa 98 parallel port connected scanner which was hung. Nice of Windows to hang the whole boot process on me for just that.

That same problem was happening to me on a XP SP2 Intel Pentium MMX machine and I had to re-install XP and SP2 about 3 times before I figured where the problem was..

When I instaled SP2, I also installed a windows update (reliability update) for intel processors (which you can find here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=26904...layLang=en)
and the reboot problem started...
In my last instalation, I didn't do that update which microsoft tells it is advisable to do... and all my system is stable again and no more cycling reboots.
I did ALL other critical updates and non critical updates and only didn't this one and the system has been stable for a few weeks now...

If you want my opinion, disable auto-instalation on microsoft updates (even the critical ones) and set it to tell you when something new is there... and you won't have misterious problems like this again.

When I had the reboots, If I did a safe reboot-restart, my system was freezing at MUP.SYS and it wouldn't move anywhere...

I hope you get your system fixed...

I've seen on other foruns that the problem was on the SP2 package which isn't really true....all my system is stable now.
Tried also that chkdsk and other things and all them FAILED big time!


Pedro Matos Rito

I had the same thing and went to another pc on my network to find out what mupsys was but found our BThub broadband was down. I restarted it and everything works fine now. I looked in system log and found that there had been some problem trying to create a device - I assume whilst it couldnt reach the dsl router. But once that was on, everything works fine.
Love...

Pedro Rito said: You will also have a computer that is slow to get critical security updates. Considering that millions of computers routinely handle automatic updates without any problems, I think it's ill-advised to delay applying critical patches that plug *known* security holes just to avoid the *chance* that one of the updates will cause an unintended problem.

I would not recommend turning off automatic updates. Better to just remember that automatic updates are enabled, and factor that knowledge into your troubleshooting if a problem does crop up.

Thought I'd better do a write-up of my encounter with the mysterious mup.sys, since my eventual solution is not one that I have seen mentioned before. As has beeen experienced by others, in my case it was a USB-related issue. For me, disabling the motherboard's USB 2.0 support in the BIOS resolved it. So I now only have USB 1.1, but at least Windows boots again.

My system (Athlon 64 3000+, GA-K8NS Pro motherboard, 3*512MB RAM) had been running fine for the past 2 years but one day the mup.sys thing came along out of the blue and even booting from my BartPE Windows Ultimate Boot CD or the Windows XP CD was suddenly not possible. Incidently, about 2 months earlier I developed a problem with the BIOS not being able to correctly identify 2 devices on the secondary IDE channel simultaneously, so I suspect that the motherboard itself has some issues. Here's the long version of what I tried, in case it's of use to anyone else:

Disconnected all hard drives except OS drive
Removed 2nd & 3rd ram sticks
Reset BIOS defaults
Removed all USB devices
Changed IDE cables
Unable to boot to recovery console - freezes at "Setup is loading Windows"
Checked capacitor heads on motherboard - appear to be fine
Disconnected USB port motherboard connectors
Swapped RAM order
Chkdsk on all volumes
Replaced mup.sys
Disabled mup.sys - now just freezes at next driver instead
Noticed there is now unallocated space on primary boot drive
Flashed BIOS to various different versions
Replaced CMOS battery - this was completely flat but this still wasn't the problem
Disabled USB 2.0 support in BIOS - SUCCESS!

Good luck folks!

Almost always after making a change that is not compatible in USB device, memory stick or video card set-up etc you will hang on MUP.sys on start up. You will unable to get into safe-mode. MUP.sys is not the problem file. Nor is SP2. MUP.SYS is only how far windows made it before the hang-up. Usually if you shutdown and unplug the device (video card, usb device etc) and re-start it will boot properly. After doing so you probably will have to un-install and re-install the device drivers for the problem device. This has been a known problem for at least 5 years. However you do not need to re-install MUP.SYS or re-install windows or flash your BIOS. The above solution works.