w2k curly one

[bish]

Hello, I hope that someone may be able to point me in the right direction regarding this problem:

It occured on my office machine while I was away on holidays and from what I can gather it went something like this.

A friend had arrived at the office to do a backup of data onto my external drive that he was keeping off site.

This drive has been used on this computer without any problems to date.

A staff member had a browser open on the problem machine and was using the net.

Friend plugged in the external drive and the computer froze.

Now they are not entirely certain if the computer froze just before the drive was connected or as the drive was connected.

When ctrl alt del couldn't be used, they did a restart.

As the computer booted, it froze again as soon as the windows splash screen appeared.

I have the hard drive partitioned into C:system - primary boot partition, D: data, G: a ghost partition of C. Everything was working correctly prior to this problem and one could boot into the G: ghost partition ok.

As per my instructions, (if anything goes wrong while I'm away, just boot into the G: partition and work from that), they tried to do this and still had exactly the same problem.

They tried booting into safe mode on both partitions - no go!

When nothing worked I suggested that they have a look at a possible hardware cause.

They swapped out the ram sticks (2 x 256) running one at a time in either slot -no go!

They checked pci cards were seated propery, cables and plugs etc. - no go!

On my arrival back in the office, I pretty much repeated what they had done except for swaping the ram out.

Then I tried booting from the w2k installation disk in order to access the recovery console - no go!!! now things were getting really wierd. The drivers were loading from the disk and then at the point where the screen announces that it is starting up windows setup - NOTHING happens it just sticks there.

One thing I noticed when I try a boot into safe mode is that it loads a number of drivers and then sticks at WINNT\System32\Drivers\Mup.sys

I was going to try and disable that one from the recovery console but as I mentioned - recovery console - no go!

I have pulled the drive out and swapped it into the external enclosure. I can access it ok via my laptop and the drive is performing as expected with no obvious problems.

[dskoe]

If(and only if) you have not had a successful reboot since your incident, you can choose the "last known good" option from the windows boot menu. This will boot your system to the condition it was in at the last successful boot. It only works once.

Make sure all hardware is the same as it was before the incident.

Good luck

[bish]

Thanks dskoe, I did try that, but it didn't work.

[bish]

Thanks for your help, the problem turned out to be the mobo and I have now replaced it.