Quake3World

Great!

I rebooted my PC a couple days ago - just saying this to show that it hasn't been up for 3 months straight or anything. Also, I got AoE3 a few days ago as a gift.

So last night I get home from work and decide to install AoE3. I throw the CD in, start the install, swap out disks, and after a few minutes it's done - just a normal installation, nothing abnormal.

When I fired up the game, the sound and video were stuttering like crazy, which is pretty weird considering I have a pretty beefy machine. Once I got past the intro clips and everything, I started playing the game, and realized there's no sound whatsoever during gameplay. When I jump back to the menu, the sound starts again. It plays for 20 seconds or so and then abruptly quits again.

So I cruise out to the AoE3 website, download the latest game patch and install it.
It doesn't ask me to reboot or anything, but I decide to restart anyway, just for the hell of it - never hurts, right?

So it shuts down, and gets past the XP white progress bar at the bottom of the screen. Once it gets to the color XP logo with the blue status bar under it, the status bar goes across once, and at the beginning of the second pass the screen goes black. Instead of launching the Windows GUI, I am surprised to see my PC posting again. So basically it's hung in a loop; it will start halfway and then automatically reboot.

I tried last known good config, safe mode, and safe mode with command prompt. No matter which safe mode I try, it always automatically reboots after the driver MUP.SYS shows on the screen.

Thinking something's seriously fucked at this point, I grab my XP cd and boot into the Recovery Console. The RC comes up, and the DISKPART command sees my drive and partitions. But when I try the LOGON command, it doesn't list any Windows installations that I can logon to - just skips a line and goes right back to the C:\> prompt.

Since I can't logon, I can't enable/disable any services or anything like that, so I decide to run a CHKDSK on it. CHKDSK gets to 26%, then stops saying one or more unrecoverable errors were found.

I am sitting at a C:\ prompt, but if I try to do a DIR, it says it can't read the information. I think this is normal though, since I'm not logged in and don't have permissions to anything.

It's a SATA drive, but I have loaded the SATA drivers during setup before booting into the console.

I guess I'm going to go buy a new hard drive tonight.

Does anybody know what the hell MUP.SYS is? I've done quite a bit of searching, and found tons of people with similar problems, but nobody seems to know how to fix it. It's all very frustrating.

I would try a format first for good measure (maybe a LL one), install xp fresh, see if things are back to normal?

I really don't want to do that if I can avoid it. I've got a lot of shit on the drive that I don't have anywhere else. See, for several months now I've been telling myself I'm going to get 2 SATA drives and run them in a mirror. That would be my backup solution, but I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

So what I want to do is install XP on a clean drive, then put mine back in to see if I can read it enough to get my stuff off.

Thankfully I have a spare 80gb IDE drive laying around, so I think I'm going to try building XP on that first, to see if I can still access the drive. But even if I can I still want to buy 2 SATA drives and run them in a mirror, so I'm thinking I could just save the effort of messing with the IDE drive by just biting the bullet and buying them now, and putting my install there.


On top of this, I was driving into the parking lot at work this morning and some silly bitch on a cellphone backed into the side of my car as I was passing her. No license, no insurance, on phone number. Luckily she works in the same building as me.

And my gf has been on antibiotics all week so I'm in a pussy drought too.

Well one thing I would recommend, is to move your My Documents, Favorites, My Pictures, My Music and Desktop folder onto your D partition.
You could even install all your programs onto the D partition also.
Then at least if windows craps out, you can do a re-install without having to worry about saving everything.
Even my Outlook .pst file is on my D partition, and actually so is the Send To folder.

I'd recommend buying Second Copy or you can even get SyncBack Freeware V3.2.9.
Then use that 80 as a backup drive.

I tried putting an IDE drive and installing XP on that, and got a generic error halfway through. I'm formatting that drive again in a diff machine right now and I'll try it again. Might try timing my memory more conservatively and see if that does anything.

Okay, I'll try to keep this short.

HDD is corrupted - I assume beyond recovery. Memtest showed hundreds and hundreds of errors. I wound up RMA'ing my memory with OCZ, and just got the new sticks in early last week.

I threw them in, absolutely 0 errors after about an hour of testing, so I'm golden.

About 3-4 days ago, I started having a couple random problems with games - mostly AoE3 since that's just about all I'm playing right now.

Today while I'm at work my roommate calls me. He got a blue screen in BF2, which hasn't happened since I had the bad memory in it.

He ran memtest again, and now this perfectly good memory gives over a thousand errors just in the first few minutes of running it. Take one stick out and only run on a single 1ghz stick, ran tests for 4.5 hours with no errors at all.


Either my power supply or motherboard is fucked, and is killing RAM, and I'm not sure which it is, although my first guess is the PSU.