AAACk! My computer no longer boots...Help?

[Mark Lamutt]

Hey guys...

My HTPC running XP Pro SP1 was on and running correctly at noon today. I turned it off. Tonight, when I went to turn it back on, it won't boot past the XP welcome screen. The little blue lights scroll normally, the screen goes black, and the system just hangs there with the hard drive light on.

I've restored my Ghost backup that I made a couple of months ago (last time I changed anything), and get exactly the same result.

Any ideas as to what could have failed and where I should start looking? Because my backup is also failing at the same point, I'm almost thinking that something hardware related has failed.

My system:

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe
P4 2.6
512 MB Kingston RAM
80GB boot drive running XP PRO, NTFS
all of the other standard accessories
Enermax 350Watt power supply

Bios reports good voltages, the fans are all running normally, temperatures are well within normal ranges.

[SimpleSimon]

Mark: Try safe mode. Use F5 or F8 (sorry, I forget which - maybe either).

I'll PM you my contact info.

[cdru]

Mark: Try safe mode. Use F5 or F8 (sorry, I forget which - maybe either).

I'll PM you my contact info.F8 at the starting windows prompt. If you have another PC, you might be able to mount that drive in it in order to run a fsck. I hate problems like this. You never know where to start.

If you have compatible equipment, start swapping out the easy stuff, processor, ram, video card. You might also disable or remove any unnecessary equipment on a troubleshooting basis. Also reseating any type of connector may help. Thermal cycling will sometimes work a connector loose.

[Mike123abc]

If all else fails boot from the XP install disk and tell it to repair your installation... of course then after you are done you will have to apply SP2 (or run windows update a lot).

[Redster]

Normally you will get beeps during the post if it is memory or video. That all seems okay so I would hazard a guess that something on the hard drive is acting up. I would turn it off again and unplug power to the case. Let is sit for a minute or 2 and then fire it back up. You can try safe mode as other have mentioned and I believe with XP there is an option on safe mode where you can monitor which commands it is trying to process. I have seen windows burp and go through a very long start up,, like it has lost its way then after 20 mins it fires up. You say the hard disk light is on,, can you hear the disk trying to do something or does it seem like its frozen ?

[Mark Lamutt]

I do hear a faint clicking sound as it sits there. My thought at this point is that I've developed a bad spot on my disk that the XP load process can't get past. Hence the click noise. And hence why my backups are failing as well.

I'll take a look at it in safe mode and see what happens. Thanks so far!

[Redster]

Seeing as to how you have a spare pc. Why not make a bootable floppy and put the scandisk program on it. Then boot up the bad and run just to see if it finds anything. I would just check for errors the first time,, not try to correct them. Just see if it finds anything. The other option would be to get a copy of ghost if you have it and a spare harddrive,, try to clone the bad over to the good. Last resort would be to put another disk in pc, bad drive as slave,, reload windows ,, at least that way you can salvage any newer data.

[Mark Lamutt]

My backups are made with Ghost. And actually, I have 4 ghosted clones (what I'm calling backups) of my drive, made at various points over the last 6 months, with the first one being right after I installed XP the last time. So, I'm not worried about data loss - learned that lesson the hard way long ago. :)

I'll try the scandisk route tonight and see if it says anything.

For what it's worth, booting up in safe mode also hangs - the last driver loaded on the list before it hangs is MUP.SYS, whatever that is. Whether it's hanging loading that one or the next one I have no idea. That was just trying to boot into safe mode. I may be able to boot into safe mode command prompt mode - that should try to load fewer drivers I would think.

And of course one of my HD recording computers would crash here on my right before the new recording season starts...grrr...

If none of this works, I'll probably pull the computer out of the equipment rack, and start pulling cards.

[Redster]

This is how you fix the VERY common Mup.sys problem.

Boot off the windows cd, load the recovery console.
Type "disable mup"
Hit Enter
All done, windows works. Mup.sys is the service to connect to Novell servers. %99.99909 of people won't need this.

another option

[Redster]

and another.

Start the Recovery console or..
Start the computer with the boot disks or Windows CDROM
After the Welcome to Setup dialog box appears, press R to repair, and then press C to start Recovery console.
Choose install Windows and log on as Administrator.

At the command prompt type "disable Mup.sys"

"MUP stands for "Multiple UNC Provider" which assists Windows in locating resources when more than one redirector is on a machine such as "Microsoft Client for Microsoft Networks" and the "Novell Client for Novell Netware". When a connection to a server is requested it does not know if the request is to a Novell server or an NT server. It will start looking for the server with the primary protocol on the primary requestor and then continue looking for the server on each protocol bound to each redirector until the server is found."

Restart the computer and all should be well

[Mark Lamutt]

Thanks Redster! I'll give that a shot first tonight.

[Redster]

anytime,, lets hope its this simple.

[cdru]

Seeing as to how you have a spare pc. Why not make a bootable floppy and put the scandisk program on it. Then boot up the bad and run just to see if it finds anything. I would just check for errors the first time,, not try to correct them. Just see if it finds anything.Scandisk is for FAT16/32 filesystems. It will not work with NTFS filesystems. So the bootdisk route will be futile. Your dos boot disk will see the partition as a partition, but thats about it.

[Mark Lamutt]

Well if all else fails, I'll just nuke and pave...but I'd rather not spend the evening going through all of that if I can avoid it. That is why I ghosted my clean install last time...

[marko]

Heh, would not be surprised if you after you disabled mup.sys another problem came up. I went through the same thing once after I installed new memory in my machine. Boot process kept stopping on various .sys items in safe mode. Could not figure it out, took out the new memory I put in, had the problem. Finally corrected itself after I switched memory banks, reset the bios, maybe some other stuff. Very odd error.

[Mark Lamutt]

Yeah, I'm getting that after doing a little bit of reading about it. I've done nothing to this computer since June, when I made the last ghost image. In fact, it's only been powered on a couple of times since then. And, everything was working just fine yesterday morning when I was recording the olympics closing ceremonies. I turned it off around noon yesterday, and when I turned it back on last night, BOOM! All of this...

The only thing that I can think of is the windows auto-update, but I'm about 99.9% sure that I have that disabled, as this computer is only used for HTPC purposes. It is connected to my network, but is behind my firewall, and as far as I know is pretty well protected.

M/B, CPU, memory, video card, data drive - all just 8 months old...not that that means a whole lot these days...

[Redster]

Scandisk is for FAT16/32 filesystems. It will not work with NTFS filesystems. So the bootdisk route will be futile. Your dos boot disk will see the partition as a partition, but thats about it.


yep, ur right, my bad. Have to have pc up and running then let scan disk reboot on an ntfs system.

[pweezil]

Mark,
Maybe this thread might help: http://forums.devhardware.com/showthread.php?t=7537&page=2

[Mark Lamutt]

Thanks pweezil - I read that thread earlier this morning...

I don't have any USB cards in this box, although I do have USB on the m/b. Don't have anything connected to them, though.

Fortunately, if this does turn out to be a hardware problem, I purchased all of my "new" hardware around the first of the year from Newegg, and they are great about warrenty and defect exchanges, even months later.

[Mark Lamutt]

Grrr...can't even get to the recovery console...boot off the XP cd, press R for repair, and it checks both of my drives. But...my second drive in this computer is a Maxtor 250GB, and the check of it thinks it's a 131GB drive, and appears to have hung. Looks like I'm going to have to pull the computer out of the rack and get into it...

[Mark Lamutt]

Hmmm...interesting now.

I pulled the computer, disconnected the 250GB drive from the cable, and then brought up the recovery console.

First time, I typed "disable mup.sys" which resulted in an error saying it couldn't find it in the registry. Then I typed "disable mup" and it did. I then restarted, and lo and behold, the computer booted right up.

Thanks for the help today guys. I don't know if this is going to last, or how long I now have before I'm going to have to nuke and pave again, but at least this gets me running again tonight.