I just spent the last four hours poring through hundreds and hundreds of posts on a notorious WinXP bootup problem that appears from nowhere. You crash, WinXP reboots, the little bars stall. You reboot in Safe Mode, and the list stops at 'mup.sys' and won't boot at all.
It probably hasn't happened to the vast majority, but when it happens you're convinced your PC is possessed by Satan and you'll need to take it apart and test every piece one by one, change the power supply, Swap drives from one machine to another, etc, etc, etc. Do a Google on mup.sys xp to see what I mean. There's even a collective term for those suffering with it; muppets.sys.
I tried all sorts of things including booting from the XP cd, chdsk, changing settings that I picked up from the zillion threads, etc. Then I got something to work that's ridiculously simple.
Before you do anything I recommend trying this first, provided you have a USB mouse:
> Pull out all your non-essential external USB devices except your keyboard and mouse.
> Press Del during the bootup sequence and go to the EXIT tab.
> Choose Load Default Settings or the one that obviously... loads the default BIOS settings. It should then reboot.
> Choose Safe Mode for XP to boot up in.
> When the list stalls at mup.sys pull out your mouse, then put it back in again.
> If nothing happened, do it again.
If you're lucky then XP boots up quick as a flash in Safe Mode. If it asks you to choose a Restore Point do so, maybe create a new Restore Point then reboot as normal.
Fingers crossed my PC's now sorted out (it's rendering as I speak). I'm only posting this because I pity any poor sap who comes across this again. It might not work for you, in which case best of luck and you have my sincerest sympathies.
