Discussion
I've got a friends computer sat beside me which won't boot up. Gets to a mup.sys and agp440.sys on the bootup, and then just resets itself - no matter which option I select from the startup menu. Can't get into windows at all, and the HP recovery tool is just a 'wipe contents reinstall partition' type tool, useless.
She hasn't given me the windows install CD (its a HP machine) and I won't get it from her for a few days, is there a downloadable tool from the interweb that I can burn to a CD and boot from, in order to try and fix whatever problem there is? I have a feeling that its probably a driver update, or windows security update, and something has gone wrong somewhere. If I can get into windows I can just use the rollback tool hopefully. Could be a virus too, so any tips on virus/spyware rescue discs would be nice
>> Edited by Parrot of Doom on Thursday 27th April 22:49
She hasn't given me the windows install CD (its a HP machine) and I won't get it from her for a few days, is there a downloadable tool from the interweb that I can burn to a CD and boot from, in order to try and fix whatever problem there is? I have a feeling that its probably a driver update, or windows security update, and something has gone wrong somewhere. If I can get into windows I can just use the rollback tool hopefully. Could be a virus too, so any tips on virus/spyware rescue discs would be nice
>> Edited by Parrot of Doom on Thursday 27th April 22:49
Knoppix will boot you in to a Linux system that I belive has NTFS read support turned on by default or at least turned on with a switch at it's boot prompt.
After that just dump stuff over the network/USB key/USB HDD.
Alternativley if it's out of warranty you could just rip out it's HDD, put it in your machine with it's jumper set to slave and use your PC to run spyware/AV/generic malware checks on it. Probably won't help you get the thing booting again though, it sounds like XP on that machine has had it.... personally wouldn't even recommend using the XP recovery console to repair as a long term solution either; most of the systems I've repaired have failed again pretty soon after with other weirdness.
After that just dump stuff over the network/USB key/USB HDD.
Alternativley if it's out of warranty you could just rip out it's HDD, put it in your machine with it's jumper set to slave and use your PC to run spyware/AV/generic malware checks on it. Probably won't help you get the thing booting again though, it sounds like XP on that machine has had it.... personally wouldn't even recommend using the XP recovery console to repair as a long term solution either; most of the systems I've repaired have failed again pretty soon after with other weirdness.
Had exactly this problem myself a few days ago, naturally I googled mup.sys to see what was going on. From what I could work out (and I'm no expert) there is a conflict with loading drivers which XP can't resolve - but it won't allow booting into safe mode and recovery seems to be difficult. In my case the computer had suddenly rebooted and it just wouldn't get past mup.sys - then I realized after a hint from a website that a wireless USB networking device had just been installed, and it was this giving the problem - removed the device and it booted as normal. Note this computer has two hard drives with XP on one and W2K on the other - it wouldn't boot into either. Try removing non essential things like network cards, dial up modems etc - take the motherboard battery out for a time, reset the BIOS to default mode to try and resolve the conflict
I'm getting the windows disc soon, if reinstalling doesn't work I'll just copy the contents of the drive over to mine, wipe the computer clean and reinstall windows, and then copy the contents back into a folder. She can then find her own files from that folder, I'm not doing it for her 
Parrot of Doom said:If you can get the files off it and you're not bothered about profiles and settings use the HP CD to reinstall... There'll be a few HP proprietary drivers that the recovery will automatically install for you. Just makes your life easier. Sometimes it's worth nuking a machine once it's done this anyway just to be safe.
I'm getting the windows disc soon, if reinstalling doesn't work I'll just copy the contents of the drive over to mine, wipe the computer clean and reinstall windows, and then copy the contents back into a folder. She can then find her own files from that folder, I'm not doing it for her
If however she hasn't got all her ISP settings (Usual!) you may need to have a delve around in there first.
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