Hi all,
This is a follow up of my previous post regarding the Mup.sys issue. (I even saw this happened on two of the demo notebooks at Microcenter.) Apparently this is a very problematic and common issue for Win XP. There are tons of link regarding this issue when I googled it. Each of them has a different solution but none of them applied to my situation (trust me, I tried them all! --well almost.) but I did learn a lot from them tho. Like everything else, once you know the solution, it appears to be extremly obvious and simple.
What I did was I took the harddrive out of the laptop, the problematic one that hanged at Mup.sys and stuck in the dreadful infinite reboot loop. I hooked it up to a USB enclosure, plugged it in to my desktop. The desktop is a multi boot machine, Windows 98, windows 2000, windows XP, and three distros of Linux. I boot the desktop into Win2000, went into the WinXP partition, copy the entire drivers folder from the Wondows\system32\drivers\ directory. (This is important, make sure WinXP is not the active OS.) I replaced the one on the laptop harddrive with this good one. Then I put the harddrive back to the laptop. Boot the laptop up with winXP CD, using the recovery console, I typed in chkdsk /r and waited with my fingers crossed. Sure enough, once the chkdsk complete, it boots up beautifully into WinXP, with 0 data lost. The sweet WinXP chime sound! As a thank you, my female friend is taking me out for dinner!
Well, why not just do a clean reinstallation? Firstly, even tho all her data were backed up, she would still have to reinstall all the applications which is a major pain in the *censored*. Secondly, it works in situation that when a original restore CD is not available, like in this case. Thirdly, a simple reinstallation is boring, cheating, no fun and no challenge.
This solution might not apply to every situation and perhaps it's not the best way, but it works for me and I hope it will help someone as well.
B.
