Hello, all.

About two years ago, I built myself a nice system. Last month, during record-setting heat, I turned it off one night, and it wouldn't work when I next powered it on.

The first time, it got through POST then said that the registry was corrupt and rebooted. It then got through POST and informed me that the Hive was messed up, but rebooted before I had time to write down the data.

After that, it would proceed to the windows XP loading screen (scrolling bar), then the screen would go blank. Every time since this first happened, the computer has gotten to the loading screen then stopped responding.

Booting in safe mode w/ command prompt lets me see that the last file loaded is Mup.sys, but my research into this shows that this particular footprint could be left by any number of hardware OR software problems.

I'm analytically minded, so I came up with a number of things I could do to determine where the problem was. Here is what I have done thus far:

Swapped video cards (Same behavior, used NVidia 7800 and only slightly-less impressive ATI)
Attempted to repair install of windows XP Pro SP2, ran chkdisk and found no problems.

Swapped in known good IDE bootable XP pro drive (same behavior)
Updated Motherboard BIOS
Ran Memtest86 for well over an hour with no problems noted

Used MSDOS boot disk to verify that my SATA mirrored raid boot drives were functional and had the same information (Though the computer had been complaining that the RAID was in critical condition for several months).

The sound card isn't related to this error, I'm sure of it.


At this point, all I can think of is that the motherboard or the processor (AMD 3500+) is kaput, and my inclination is that it would be the motherboard.

Any ideas if my intuition (Only three options, Mobo, CPU, or both) is correct? I don't have the motherboard info on me right now, but it's a Gigabyte that has worked well for these two years.

Thanks in advance!