Yes, that’s exactly the problem I faced today morning. My Asus-P5VDC-MX based PC started throwing me the (infamous) mup.sys error. It goes like this, I click the ‘ON’ button, I see the BIOS messages and the screen is full of vertical lines, dots mostly. Windows XP shows the familiar ‘Do you want to goto SAFE BOOT’ etc…
Whatever I select, I see the screen loading all the drivers but stops at mup.sys. That’s it, it wouldn’t go further. The PC freezes at that point.
I suspected a corrupted driver file, and started running the Windows Installer CD, thinking either to run the repair mode or worst case scenario to format and do a fresh install. This threw me the blue screen, warning me of BIOS ACPI error !
As usual, I google to see what others do in similar circumtances. Voila this is a common issue and the web is full of various ‘solutions’. I found this rather lengthy thread at Tom’s Hardware insteresting but wouldn’t give me a clear solution (rather it has too many of them).
My current BIOS verserion was 0601, dated 6/6/2006. ASUS site shows me the latest as 0809, dated 2008/01/10. I knew at that point I have to update the BIOS, looking at the process, required me to creat e boot disk, then copy the ROM image and the FLASH writer (AFUDOS.exe) to it. But hey I gave up floppies a while back. So can’t I use a ROM or USB Flash disk instead? USB Flash path only possible is BIOS has support to it, mine didn’t, so the only option is to see whther I can boot from the CDRom.
Many days of googling finaly gave me what I was looking for: Hiren & Pankaj has an excellent blog on making bootable devices at : http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootablecd
It even has a link showing how to make a USB Flash bootable disk. All I wanted to do was now copy the ASUS driver files to the /testdisk folder and running “Build-ISO.cmd” from the DOS prompt. This gave me “BootCD.iso”, a writable image. I used PowerISO to burn the image to a CDRom.
Once I setup BIOS to boot from CDRom, it was a piece of cake. When I booted from this CD, I had X:\ as CD Drive and R:\ as a RAM Disk.
X:\testdisk had all the ASUS files as planned. Then it was a matter of running AFUDOS.exe with the right ROM image.
All in all that was a nice experience. The PC runs without any issue so far !
