Cannot Get Into Safe Mode Or Boot Normally

I was trying to get into safe mode to do a defrag, so what i did was restart and push f8 and boot into safe mode. It seemed like all of the drivers would load but it would hang up and then the system would restart. after doing this with the differnt options under the f8 screen and having no success i booted windows normally and went into msconfig, clicked on the boot tab and selected the safeboot option with minimal, restarted the system and it crashes at the windows xp screen, then reboots and crashes at the windows xp screen again, after this i tried once again to boot into safe mode with f8 but it crashes and reboots. So basically it is stuck in a loop and wont bot normally. Help please!

 

Hi Nshimmy and welcome!

I have a problem making your explanation fit my understanding of how Windows works.

If you finally gave up on all of the other options in the Windows Boot Options screen and were then able to boot Windows normally, it begs the question, what happened when you tried the "Last Known Good configuration? "

It surely would have worked also. It may work even now. Have you tried it?

 

yes multiple times, and sorry bout the confusion earlier let me revise it, after doing this multiple times with the safe mode option and having no success i booted windows normally and went into msconfig, clicked on the boot tab and selected the safeboot option with minimal, then i restarted the system and it crashes at the windows xp screen, then reboots and crashes at the windows xp screen again, after this i tried once again to boot into safe mode with f8 but it crashes and reboots, after a while i tried the last known good config. and it went to the windows xp screen and crashed. So basically it is stuck in a loop and wont bot normally. Help please!

 

Do you have a floppy drive?

If so, download the following two files. Read the text file first and then place a blank floppy in your drive and run the executable file. It will create a boot floppy that will hopefully get you back into Windows so that you can reset the msconfig file. Boot with it in the drive, assuming you have your BIOS set to check floppy on boot. If not, do so.

Text File

XPquickBootCreator

 

I hope I didn't scare you off Nshimmy.

If you have no floppy drive, we can do it another way. Not to worry.

You can always boot to your XP install CD and run the Recovery Console. You can edit the boot.ini file from there by running the bootcfg command. When you ran msconfig and selected the safe/minimal boot, the boot.ini file was altered to include those switches on the load line. Just delete them and save the file or let XP discover your system anew and write the file back to the default version. Close RC and reboot normally. With any luck you'll be able to get back the bootability that was lost when you did the msconfig change.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...ocs/en-us/recovery_console_cmds.mspx?mfr=true

 

Hi Surferdude2

Hope you don't mind a comment.

Worth trying to fixboot etc..

But running "last known" more than once before a full boot to desktop and a normal shutdown sequence is known to cause problems.

She may need to do an overlay/repair install.

Mike

 

You are kind of scary tho!

Mike

 

Nope! I never mind others joining in when I'm wrecking someone's system. Now it's going to be your fault.

I just wanted it to move along a little bit faster, the suspense was killing me.

That's news to me but then I generally never did trust that feature enough to use it. I'm big on backup images, they work very well.

 

I forgot to mention that you can also delete the boot.ini file from the Recovery Console. The system will boot without it if you're in the 90% that has Windows XP on the first partition of the first physical disk (disk 0 in the ARC system).