In safe mode, it consistently occurs at the same file (mup.sys).
By repair install, do you mean re-installing Windows in some sort of repair mode? That scares me. I don’t want to lose all the info I have on the HD. Much of my current efforts are devoted to saving the HD. They’re RAID striped - otherwise I would likely just buy a new system and plunk the old HD(s) in.
That might not mean anything since I think it’s always the last driver loaded, so it could be anything beyond that point (video card initialization?). The RAID is obviously working though.
A repair install keeps all your data and programs (including users, the registry, etc.), but redetects your hardware and rolls the OS back to whatever the version on the CD is. It should be a ‘Press R for…’ option when selecting where to install XP, and should be low-risk as long as you don’t repartition or select a “why yes, I would like to reformat it as NTFS!” option along the way. EDIT: You might need a floppy with drivers for the RAID chipset, though.
If you want to get at your data before risking a repair install, a boot/rescue disk might work. I’d use a Linux one myself, but there are probably Windows ones too.
And for the love of god, keep regular backups if you’re going to be putting critical data on a striped array. Hell, it’s a good idea anyway.
58 degrees? That fan/sink combo is either broken, or something’s getting too
little/too much power, or you’ve accidentally overclocked your CPU…or maybe
the CPU is broken. I think you are about to enter what we techies refer to as ‘Hell’ :/
Perhaps resetting the BIOS could change some things. Back to defaults, let it
detect the CPU again, that sort of thing. All you have to do is “reset to defaults”
and save the settings. Tweaking comes after you get things working normally.
CPU FSB/multiplier or RAM speed could be wrong, fans could be spinning way
too slow to make it cool enough. The reset should fix software reasons for
why this could be the case.
Run SpeedFan and check your power supply. Fluctuating voltage along the CPU power rail could also be a cause of your reboots.
Hmm, on rereading that’s probably not so likely if the reboot keeps happening at exactly the same place.
Doing the Windows repair thing seems to have resolved things. Thanks all.