How we go again, another Windows crap. My friend has a HP Pavilion dv4000 notebook with WindowsXP (I think it's Pro) preinstalled. One DAY, out of the blue, she tried to boot it up, it just automatically goes into safe mode.  In the safe mode, no matter which option she choose, even the last known configuration, it will just loop back to the safe mode screen again. when choose the boot with commamd prompt, it always stuck at Mup.sys. Also the BSOD will flash for a micro second, can't even read what it says before it returns to the safe mode again. I set the harddrive up as a slave on my Windows XP PC, copied the Mup.sys to her laptop, it didn't HELP. How can I fix this without resort to a complete reinstallation? (She has a lot of school works on the laptop.)

B.If the laptop has a floppy drive then DLoad and create the 6 disk XP set...you can then get to the recovery console.
From there i would try both fixboot and fixmbr though do them one at a time...Schoolwork, even a LOT of it should fit on a flash drive. A complete reinstall may not be a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it may be avoided by other means. Do you have a real XP CD for that machine? I am not aware that XP Pro came with that model, and HP does not usually provide them, but have a read:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mup.sysDiagnose memory.Hi,

Thanks all for the reply.

I backed up all my firends's school works to my PC, so I can do a  fresh installation of XP. But the problem now is the CD. She brought this laptop from COMPUSA two years ago, but she dosen't recall it came with a XP or restore CD. I called HP and they told me that she would have to buy it from HP. This really pissed me off. Shouldn't it be mandatory each computer come with an OS? It's like buy a car without an engin. How do they expect people to fix it when things go wrong? -Expecially with this Windows junks. Great, not only one has to pay for Microsoft's junk, one has to pay twice to buy another Microsoft crap in order to fix the first piece trash. Speacking of highway robbery.

All my years using the Mac, I never have this kind of problems. Down with Windows, up with Mac and Linux!  

B.Most laptop manuf. will put everything you need for a full factory restore on a hidden partition that will take the machine back to day one....WARNING you will lose all your data with this method.
Travel to HP's site for instructions on how to proceed.

But i'm still not convinced you need to re-install. Did you read my suggestion on the recovery console ? ?
This method should at least make the machine bootable so a proper backup of data can be done.

Also once in the running machine you can disable the mup service which is not needed in her case and that would solve the issue...

Either way.Hi Patio,

I tried the use the console with fixboot and fix mbr, none of them works. As far as the download concern, this laptop doesn't heve a floppy drive. I check out the disk management, it does have a partition around 400 K or so, I will see how I can restore it from there. Personally I don't want to reinstall the whold system all over again either.

B.Try booting with all USB devices unplugged and report back the results...Hi,

There's no USB DEVICE plug in. Well, according to the guy at HP, he said I need to do this: I need to extract the 204M partition on the hard drive, made an img file then burn it as a bootable CD. So I did just that. Now the laptop can start with the CD, boots into DRDOS, OKA, NR. The only thing that is an exe file is WWBMU EXE, I tried and everything is in German, now where do I go from here? Any majic here I can use to fix the harddrive?

By the way, when I cd to the DRDOS directory, everything just zips right by, how can I stop it so that I can see what commands are available?

Thanks.

B.dir /p will let it be seen a page at a time with the spacebar used to move ahead a screen at a time...

Setup should start automatically...if it doesn't then wait for everything to settle down and type setup at the prompt and hit Enter.

I have no idea what programs you listed are because you used acronyms ...the only one i recognise is Dr DOS...can you be more specific ? ?

I also know absolutely no German....Thanks Patio. Problem solved!   I made another thread  of this subject, hopefully it will help someone else.

B.Glad to hear you're fixed up...