New motherboard. Won't boot past mup.sys
Saturday, May 7, 2005 at 8:03 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by John Orth
(1 messages posted)
I just spent three of the most frustrating days in my life fixing this problem.
It started when my Emachines T2200 (AMD 2200+) blew the motherboard. I replaced
the original board, an L7VMM2, with an Asus. Of course, everyone on this thread
knows what happened. It would not boot past mup.sys.
I tried almost everything suggested on this thread, removing USB devices, unplugging
PCI cards, changing BIOS settings, flashing the BIOS, moving the memory to the other
slot, getting into recovery console and running chkdsk on the drive, etc. etc. etc.
Nothng worked.
To make matters worse, the useless Emachines OEM version of Windows is just an imaged
hard drive, not a proper Windows disk. I had to borrow a real Windows XP disk from
my daughter.
The computer would work fine to a fresh install of Windows onto a spare hard drive,
but would fail every time on the original drive.
Ultimately, I got it going by taking my daughter's XP disk, booting to the CD, selecting
'install Windows', then selecting 'repair an existing Windows installation'.
The computer works fine now, and I didn't loose any of my files or settings. There
is still one major glitch however - the Windows disk did not really repair the existing
copy of Windows. It overwrote it. Now I am getting prompted to activate my copy
of Windows, which I can't do because the same disk was used on my daughter's computer.
It looks like I am going to have to buy another Windows disk and install it again
to solve this problem once and for all.
By the way, I think the culprit in all of this is Microsoft and their stupid product
activation. They are jerking us around just so they can make 50 gadzillion dollars
instead of only 48 gadzillion dollars. Allow me to elaborate.
Most OEM PC's do not require Windows to be activated. Microsoft allows them to circumvent
the activation process by using a technique referred to as 'System Locked Pre-installation'
or SLP. This system uses information stored on the BIOS to prevent piracy. At boot,
Windows compares this BIOS information to information it has stored. If it matches,
the PC boots. If it doesn't - mup.sys. This explains why changing the motherboard
causes this problem. Wonderful for Microsoft, not so wonderful for anyone who uses
their product.
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 |  | | | |  | New motherboard. Won't boot past mup.sys (John Orth: Sat, May 7, 2005, 8:03 pm) |
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