[hblug] Windows fault "mup.sys"

[Fraser Burns]

Those of you who were at the meeting this month will have noticed that I 
brought in a Windows machine that wasn't booting correctly and came to a 
  complete stop just after loading "mup.sys"

In our searches we learnt that the problem has been around for about 2 
years, but no one has a fool proof way of fixing it. Most people blame 
some card, or hard drive etc etc. or some other part of the Windows 
operating system, blah blah

In the tests we ran, we used a Linux live CD to run memory tests which 
all passed with flying colours. But we couldn't get the live CD to run 
beyond that. So this seemed to rule out it being the windows operating 
system being the direct problem.

Well after about 8 hours searching, I found one gentlemen who put up an 
excellent argument for it being the ESCD which of course is the part of 
the bios that you reconfigure regularly. His argument boiled down to 
this getting corrupted for reasons not clear. This then explained the 
many different scenarios and sometimes fixes that often existed or 
worked. So yes it is probably something in Windows and particularly 
service pack 2 that seems to insert this corrupted data. However that 
also means that the repair is also usually fairly straightforward and 
doesn't require the loss of all your data.

One person claims that he has now fixed 84 machines with no data loss!
So if you get this message don't despair. However it does take the 
addition of a lot of ideas before you can start to see the common 
information and start to work it out.

regards
Fraser