Safe Mode won't start

I shut down my XP Home pc last night - everything had worked fine, albeit a little slower than usual. Today it won't boot up, just re-cycles to the Windows screen then black screen and does the same all over again. I was able to use the F8 button to get to the Safe Mode screen and tried several options there - although I received the "safe mode" in the 4 corners it just returns to the black screen. Any thoughts anyone ?
Appreciated.

 

Were you able to work in Safe Mode? Did you see "safe mode" in the four corners, but then you were not able to get to the desktop in Safe Mode?

Matt

 

Exactly

 

I get as far as the "Safe Mode" in the 4 corners and that's it... nothing works after that. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work at any time.

 

If you cannot work in Safe Mode, there will be serious problems with Windows. If you get to a blank/black screen every time, it would appear that the graphics drivers are corrupt.

About the only thing I would risk doing is booting to the Windows CD (if you have a full version, not a "system recovery" disk) and then go to the first option, the Recovery Console, and running chkdsk /r.

The next option would be booting to Windows CD, going through the first few options until you are offered to repair the current Windows installation.

If you have important data, you will need to connect the harddrive into another computer (Win 2000 or XP if it formatted as NTFS) and backup the data that way (the repair installation could fail).

Matt

 

after trying to start safe mode, I get many msgs. starting with: multi(0)rddisk(0)partition(2)\windows\system32\drivers\.........first one ends ql11080.sys...........all end in .sys, but thats all I get any ideas how to ger in safe mode from here, I am trying to enable a monitor i disabled........thanks D