xp repair from another xp partition.

alantc

Windows is halting on boot when it gets to mup.sys. I have it on a SATA disk so when I installed first time I had to plug a floppy drive into the PC while I was installing. Now I don't have one but I do have XP installed on another partition too. Does anyone know how to repair my main installation without having to add drivers to the windows CD?

Thanks.

Fenster

alantc wrote:

Windows is halting on boot when it gets to mup.sys. I have it on a SATA disk so when I installed first time I had to plug a floppy drive into the PC while I was installing. Now I don't have one but I do have XP installed on another partition too. Does anyone know how to repair my main installation without having to add drivers to the windows CD?

Thanks.

Try running "chkdisk <drive>" from a console?

There's also BartPE, which has served me well on occasions where Knoppix can't sort something out.

BartPE essentially creates a bootable, live CD of Windows XP. You can add whatever tools and utilities you wish. Its pretty nice for cleaning out virii and spyware.

And lastly, a search of Google never hurts. I've run into the mup.sys problem before and I've found it generally easier to reformat and reinstall.

On that note, you say you've a second installation of XP created, you can always copy your important files to the second partition and reformat. Its always worthwhile keeping your personal files on a seperate partition, I do this for my /home folder and its saved my ass on several occasions.

alantc

I ad searched google already but pretty much all the answers I found were things to do if you can get into windows (remove drivers...) or hardware answers. I guess what I'm really asking is can I run the repair untility that comes up as an option when you install windows from a drive that has the drivers I need to see my main drive.
Or is there any handy utility that I can download to fix it. What is on the CD that I would use be using to fix it?

I'll chkdsk tomorrow morning anyway.

I'd like to avoid formatting. I have a habit of missing one thing each time I format, usually address book, last time email (had to use partitionmagic to rebuild to get it back!). I looked into moving documents and settings to another partition a while back but it looks like there is no easy way once you've installed windows.


W

Fenster

Well like I said, you've two partitions, you might keep all your personal documents in them in case the worst happens in future.

And as you've probably figured out, there's no easy fix for a mup.sys problem.

You might run a repair installation of Windows also, without formatting. You'll need to reinstall all your drivers afterwards and there's a chance you might loose anything of worth in c:\documents and settings\*, but its your best shot of it.

alantc

OK, it's fixed now but I don't understand how...

I spent a few hours today making a new XP CD. This was what I was trying to avoid. The broken PC had 3 drives in it, one IDE and 2 SATA on RAID1 which was my c: When the computer broke, it broke 2 windows installations. No matter whether I tried to boot of the sata or ide, it always stopped at mup.sys even with the other drive unplugged.

I reintalled windows on the IDE drive (easiest, nothing on the partition to lose) and installed the sata drivers to see the other drive. (I unplugged one of the raid drives so i definitly couldn't lose anything). Then I went and made my new windows cd with my sata drivers on it and motherboard drivers etc in folders on it. When I tried to boot off it it immediatly rebooted my computer.

So I tried to boot of the sata drive again. It worked. I can't understand why. The only difference was that there was only 1 of the 2 raid drives plugged in at the time. I plugged the other back in soon after and the PC seems fine. I changed nothing on that drive (played some music off it) so I don't see why it stopped working for a month.

Thanks anyway.