Today, I was ripping some of my CDs to mp3 when iTunes froze. More than iTunes, the whole WinXP Home Edition of Windows was stuck. I rebooted, but after it went through the bios startup screens, windows would not start. It didn’t even flash the lights on the keyboard.

I tried to restart in safe mode and it got to a file called mup.sys and stopped for good.

I set the PC bios to default. I took away all the electricity. I yelled a bit. Nothing worked.

Then I called Ken at shieldsit.com and he said, “Unplug that DVD drive.” I did and it worked fine. I was delighted.

I tried doing a system restore and reinstalling the DVD drive, but that didn’t help. I put a different DVD drive in (a twin to the one I removed) and the new one worked. I noted the new one was set to “Cable Select” so just for fun, I changed the jumper on my old DVD drive from “Master” (where it has been working fine for a couple years) to “Cable Select” and connected it up. It worked great.

Thanks Ken!

UPDATE (January 2007):
This was a problem with my power supply. I replaced it and all is well.

UPDATE (January 2007 – later):
Nope. Still does it. With BOTH DVD-RW drives. Puzzling.

UPDATE: (January 2007) – later):
Got it — the drive cable had been installed backwards. There are three connectors on most 80 connector ide cables: Connector A separated by about 10 inches of cable from Connector B separated by about 5 inches of cable from Connector C. Because of the physical distance between drives, some goofball had plugged connector C into the motherboard, and then B and A into the drives. A was plugged into the DVD drive. I relocated the drive and installed the cable correctly. All is well. Oh — the goofball? That would be me. Maybe I should file this post under HUMOR.