Startup hang on mup.sys, BSOD with iastor.sys

I have a problem with my sister's Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V8010D laptop, bought a few years back. I've had a good search around and I can't find anything to resolve my problem, so hopefully you guys might have an idea.

Apparently it had randomly turned itself for no reason prior to this. The problem started when the laptop would not shutdown down. My sister had to do a manual shutdown via holding the power button down.

She restarted it and was presented with the choice of booting methods: normal, last known configuration that worked, safe mode, safe mode with networking/command prompt.

Normal will hang on the loading bar screen, never moving past this.
Last known configuration gives a BSOD screen stating an error with "iastor.sys ".
Every method of safe mode loads up files up to "mup.sys" and then hangs.

I tried using a Windows XP Professional disk to enter the recovery console, however, I press R when given the option, and the laptop tells me it cannot find a hard drive, and makes me reboot the computer.

So in short I'm presented with either hanging screens, BSOD, or I'm told there's no hard drive in the computer.

This is as much information as I can provide at the moment, I have not tried a format as I want to try and rescue the files on the hard drive. I'll try and supply any information you require.

Any assistance with this would be truly, truly appreciated.

 

Have you read this:

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/97354.html

mickzer.

 

Thanks for that link, I'll try swapping the RAM around and see what happens.

I had considered making the hard drive a slave in another machine to see if I could access it, however I didn't want to go down that route yet until all other options had been exhausted. Seems like I may be giving this a go anyway.

 

I have (had?) a similar issue with my desktop XP Home SP2 computer. (Haven't checked recently.)

My computer appeared to hang at mup.sys while booting into Safe Mode. (Mup.sys was the last driver listed on the black screen during safe mode boot.) However, I left my computer on at that "hang" and came back a few hours later to find the computer had finally booted into Safe Mode.

I also have a Logitech cordless mouse I use with my desktop so the link mickzer provided may be helpful. I will investigate this further later when I have more time.

I can boot into Windows Normal Mode so I have not aggressively attempted to solve my similar issue. I will be following this thread with interest.

 

I've managed to fix the laptop, hopefully permanently, by connecting it to my computer and having Windows run a checkdisk. Checkdisk found some problems, I can't recall what they were sorry, and fixed them all, I stuck it back in the laptop and it's fine.

I can only suggest attempting the same if you get this error, sorry I couldn't provide any more valuable information on the subject.

Thanks for the help.