?Well, fall is right around the corner. And just in time is the good old Mup.sys error in Windows XP.

Let me start off by saying that it was 10:30pm. I have 3 songs that need to be mixed in the next week or so. I had no plans of doing any serious mixing. I just wanted to take a few hours and get each song ready to rock. I wanted to render down the DHF Superior drum tracks to .wav files, clean up all my edit, etc so that I could hop right in and begin mixing without any major obstacles.

I fired up Cubase SX 3.0.0 and, of course, it crashed. It seams to do this constantly when a song is near completion. (Needless to say, I'll be rendering down my DHF Superior drum tracks much sooner down the road). Anyway, I decided to go ahead and restart as I typically do. When I restarted, I was faced with a black screen for way too long. I know the BIOS had loaded, but it appeared that Windows was having trouble. I did the usual “restart 4 times” trick. It didn't work. Damn! On to plan B which consisted of the “remove the video card and put it right back in” trick. No good there either.

Next I did the “try every possible option given when tapping F8 during startup” trick. Of course, in trying to load in safe mode, Windows stopped after loading Mup.sys. YES! MY FAVORITE!!! This little problem is one I'm used after dealing with so many home computers, but not one I've faced in a recording machine / DAW. Well good. Me and Mup.sys are like arch nemesis who respect each other. We the other to die, but we'll be saddened for losing a worthy opponent.

Yeah, Anyway! Back to reality. The old Mup.sys thing is a bitch. It's a real pain because it's very hard to tell if it's hardware of software related. So I did the usual PC troubleshooting. I yanked out the Firewire / USB 2.0 card. I yanked out the soundcard. I started to take out one of the RAM chips, but got lazy and decided not to. (It didn't feel like a RAM problem anyway...whatever that means!). Finally, I unhooked all hard drives, but my C: Windows drive.

Of course, while doing this, I did the “restart a zillion times” trick, which never panned out either.

So back to the “click every possible option after tapping F8 during restart” trick. Safe mode and all it's variations still froze at Mup.sys, but I was able to get into Windows with the “Most Recent Settings That Worked” option. I don't think that one has EVER worked for me before. Oh well, it got me in. I decided to run Scandisk or chkdsk or whatever you call it on the C: drive. I did the usual right click on C: in My Computer, selected “tools” and “check this disk for errors”. Of course, it needs Windows to restart.... DAMN! I'm back to the black screen again.

So, I figure I'll launch it from the command line. So, I dig up my Windows XP SP2 disk and boot it (I had to change my boot order in the BIOS by tapping “delete” when starting the computer). After Windows loads a bunch of junk for 5 minutes I launched the “Recovery Console” which is basically just DOS or what I call “DOS”. I typed “chkdisk /p and (I can't remember if it was /r or /f because I just learned this trick tonight. Look it up if you don't know, but I'm sure it's one of those two). Anyway, that took about 30 minutes to run and it didn't spit out any errors. So, I try to restart Windows the normal way. What do know? The same black screen!!

It turns out that “Use The Last Settings That Actually Worked” thing fixes my black screen problem every single time. So I go round and round fighting this PC. As long as I don't select scandisk, the computer boots fine. So, I started plugging back in my hard drives, net cards, etc. Of course, it wanted me to reinstall a bunch of drivers, but for the first time in history, Windows found them all without me needing to dig up driver disks.

So right now my home recording computer is technically functioning, but I'm just a little less confident in it than I usually am...which is not that high to begin with!

So now it's 2:22am. I wasted close to 4 hours and essentially solved nothing and learned nothing. Oh well. That's kind of been the story of my life since I got into this whole recording thing anyway!.