Argghh...System's messed up

I did the start button trick on my sister's emachine, running Windows XP Home edition and put in an ASCII character 32 instead of a NULL(0). Now I ****ed up my sister's computer and this could ruin our relationship! :( (just kidding) But it's serious. I tried to change it back and didn't change it back the same way. Now when I try to start it under MS-DOS Safe mode, it shows those lines and stops right after it loads "mups.sys", and starting Windows up in any other mode doesn't work. I've even went as far as putting in the default install CD that came with it. It went through and told me that it installed successfully but wjen it reboots the same problems occur as though it really didn't replace the data on the HDD. My family's upset (like I care), but really, iit just makes things worse than they are, so even though I made a simple mistake and should have followed procedure, PLEASE post help immediately. :(

Reset the bios in a manner consistent with the manufacturer's recommendation. If this doesn't solve the issue, try "chkdsk /r", if this fixes the problem, get a new hard drive.

cheers,

catch

If I'm reading ok he just f'kt up some windows dll or exe while doing his "start button trick"..

What is that a start button trick, hex editing some .exe or .dll (put in an ASCII character 32 instead of a NULL) ?
Did you make a backup of the file(s) before editing ?

Quote:

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I did the start button trick on my sister's emachine

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Can you clarify exactly what you did?

*edit*

W00t! #800

I did the start button trick many times, never fu*ked up my system, so i think you did something else, or changed the wrong values in the dll....

I think what he means by the start button trick is how you can change that registry value and make it where u can put anything text wise into the start bar.... example: instead of start it would say GO! but thats just my guess...

Look at the symptoms, not the user's alleged cause.

cheers,

catch

I don't think we can really help you until you explain in detail what you did in this "start button trick".

As far as the install CD goes, it will reinstall the files from the CD, but it will keep your settings from your current install, which is what is screwed up.

I would venture to guess the best way to fix this is through a BartPE disc and a remote registry editor, but thats assuming that you changed something in the registry. Let us know what you did.

The Start button trick is when you hex edit Explorer.exe to change the text
to something else. The characters are unicode 16 bit values instead of ascii
So I can see if you screw up the second byte of a char it won't be right.
It seems odd that it would prevent explorer from loading though.

Anyway, you just need to extract a fresh copy from your install cd.
Somebody help, I'm not a Windows expert. You just need to replace
explorer.exe with a good copy.
:cool:

:eek: Sorry I was gone for a bit. Now this is what I did exactly:

1) Rebooted and held F8
2) Started up in Safe Mode DOS under Administrator
3) cd\
4)cd windows
5)attrib -r explorer
6)edit /70 explorer.exe

(clubs symbol)S t a r t

(this appears on line: 3824 in Windows XP Home)

If you click on the spaces between the letters it should be Value: 0 for a NULL.
I used del to take out the S and type in another letter, then after that is where I messed up.
Instead of highlighting a null, copying and pasting it after the new letters I used to replace "S t a r t" I used the space bar to keep the space in between. After the desktop didn't show up (xcept for the background picture, I restarted and tried to change back what I did. The prob is I had a few times where your thumb hits the space bar more than intended and I didn't care to count the times I did that. Now, for some strange reason, after I restarted, hoping I did right, I can't even load in dos.

When I attempt to:
the lines of data go by at the beggining and it stops after loading "mup.sys"

another problem, the eMachines/windows XP startup disc claims to have sucessfully loaded to the harddrive, erasing everything from the partitions and so on, starting on a clean slate, but then after the disc is through, the system restarts and the problem's still there.

Clearly the original poster's problem was not created by editing explorer.exe, the symptoms do not match up, yet all of you seem hung up on that point. Never listen to what the user says the problem is, if they knew so much, they wouldn't be asking. Look at the symptoms and work back from there.

A quick search of Google would have lead you to one of MANY sites (mostly in message board format) that come to the exact same conclusions as this: http://www.mcpmag.com/columns/articl...itorialsID=729

That is: the issue is most likely with the bios, but could maybe possibly be with the drive... but check the bios first.

If that doesn't fix it, then we can look to more obscure issues like Prescott L2 cache and such that may also cause this problem.

cheers,

catch

You had to have changed something other than explorer.exe. Upon reinstallation, all the software is replaced. So you must have changed something outside of the environment. This could be the MBR, BIOS settings, or any other on board garbage (some motherboards have tweaking utilities built into the board).

A_T