Safe Mode Around and Around

I did something stupid.....when I went to safe mode it would reboot after a quick blue screen. I decided to go to msconfig and enter force safe mode. Now all that did was keep me going around and around with no way to enter msconfig again because it will not boot up. Help I am lost. Thanks. Jim

 

You would be wise to run a hard drive diagnostic first to see what condition the drive is in.

If the drive is not too old, like less than four years, and not making any noise, then you'll probably be OK for this next step.

Don't go doing this on the first opinion posted, but your best bet would be to whip out your OS installation disc, and do a Windows repair.

The repair will leave all your data intact, but reset the OS to it's out of the box state.

Good luck, and post if you have any other questions.

:cool

 

Thank you for the suggestion, Luckily I was able to boot with the dos prompt and edit the boot.ini. I still can't get into safe mode but it does boot.Thanks again. Jim

 

WAIT there are 2 repair OPTIONS and one will lead to a complete REFORMAT. Read these guides first and then do it the proper WAY:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189400897

Next time be careful of what you play with in msconfig.

 

Hi,

You have to edit your boot.ini and remove the /safeboot option.

If you have the XP installation disc you can use Recovery Console and the bootcfg command to rebuild the boot.ini file. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980

If you don't have the XP installation disc you can download an ISO version of Recovery Console. You will need to burn the ISO to a CD as an image file using ImgBurn or similar burning software. Then boot from the CD and use the bootcfg /rebuild command.