Help Computer Problem

Had a power failure today and seems to have killed my pc

On start up all i get is the Windows Screen and it just keeps going and going.

I then went to safe mode and all options lead to the same thing:

it gets stuck on Systems32/mup.sys

i have googled it and found some forums talking about it, seems fairly common but none of the solutions i have found work for me. Cant even get the boot up disc to be recognized so i can try a repair.

Anyone had this problem or know any solutions? Reformat is not an option

Thanks

try running your pc without any extra usb slots, graphics cards, firewire ports etc, just the bare minimum. 1 stick of RAM, one HDD and the Mobo.

You can probably get away with leaving your raid array as is.

you get my email about that very old virus that caused the same probslems?

Just buy a MAC Mike

Hi Mike, I have a business here and these types of things are what I do lot of. I use Google also to find the answers but that can take some time, many of the threads have you reading for hours and get no real answer, here is one to try with a fixed solution, oh and by the way I'd say it's a virus doing this.:

http://www.hardwaregeeks.com/board/showthread.php?t=27640

Oh and heres a tip, if it 's a desk top and you have to format do so with a new harddrive and keep the one with your data on, then add it after as a second harddrive and you will be able to take all the data of it safe and sound.

Mike,

Just had this problem the other day as well. In short, I reloaded Windows XP. Of course I had most everything backed up so its a mere inconvenience.

If you have the XP disk you can try going from into your bios, set your boot device as the CDROM and it will take you to a screen with two choices.

Continue installing XP

Go to Recovery mode

Select recovery mode. This will get you to a command prompt. If you haven't backup important files, recovery mode should allow you to do that. As an absolute last resort you can try typing bootcfg / rebuild at the command prompt. That supposedly creates another Windows XP boot file. One that you can give a different name and select upon boot up. The only problem here is it asks you what drivers you want to load. I tried all this and managed to get to windows safe mode with networking but couldn't ever get it to boot to windows in normal mode.

As with Kriptap's advice I'll further the notion of a virus although I did several free online virus scans and nothing came up. The reason I think its something new and insidious is my recovery dates were limited only back to the date of the original failure...so I couldn't use recovery mode through windows to restore my PC. Furthermore, I couldn't seem to load enough drivers to make McAfee run a virus scan. BTW - My PC was being protected by McAfee as well.

BTW - here's a pretty neat tool. I have somehow misplaced my XP CD. So I couldn't load windows back until I found this little piece of freeware that goes out automatically and brings back your product code once your in safe mode.

kf141.zip

the nightmare continues...

damn thing won't run the cd drive for some reason....can't get the disc to boot even after setting it up right in BIOS

i had this happen the other night ... and like people indicated this can be the symptom of many different problems

My fix was ... when you get it to boot from the windows CD, chose the repair option. This will boot to a command line. Use the command chkdsk /r to run a checkdisk and fix any error (caused by HDD writing being interupted by a hard reset). then type exit and it *should* reboot

the nightmare continues...

damn thing won't run the cd drive for some reason....can't get the disc to boot even after setting it up right in BIOS

try swapping out the CD or even just switching the cable to the other IDE connector on the motherboard.

force CD booting by puuting the cd drive as boot option 1 in the bios

HTH

Leander