Last Updated on December 4, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
We got a call about a server that was getting a black screen of death on boot. It’s been around for a few years. I went into safe mode and it was hanging up at mup.sys.
This doesn’t necesarrily mean that mup.sys was bad. Rather than go and replace it, I opted for removing all of the USB devices along with a parallel printer connection. The onboard USB is 1.x and there was a 2 port usb 2.x add on card (I said it was an old machine).
The machine then booted normally. I added back one device at a time until I found that it would hang when the external hard drive was connected back to the USB 1.x onboard port. It was either the USB port or the hard drive. I put a USB 2.0 hub on one of the USB 2.0 ports on the add on card. When I plugged everything into that things worked fine. For some reason, the USB 1.0 port decided to fail. Time to spec out a new server for them . (Actually the time to do that is in the past. However, with a bit of recession looming, clients arent’ too quick to do upgrades. )