RE: can't boot into Safe Mode

Regarding what wyocowboy wrote:

1. yes I have SP 2 installed. And I did not see anything at the F8 prompt
about “disable automatic restart….”. But I can certainly look for the
setting in windows to disable the auto restart.
2. The system uses IDE drives – not SATA. So BartPE should have been able
to see the drives.
3. I tried to do a reinstall of XP after the chkdsk (the type of reinstall
without the formatting) however XP insisted there was no partition on the
drive. I could not do anything with the repair or reinstall because it
insisted there was no partition there. That was why I ended up with the full
reformat.
4. After reformatting and reinstalling XP I discovered that the 2nd drive on
my system (also IDE and used solely for backup) was also corrupted. In the
disk management tools in XP it indicated there was no partition there. No
drive letter was assigned. This is consistent with what BartPE found .
Apparently the file system on the backup drive was corrupted too!!!! I was
able to recover data from this drive using some file recovery software that I
own. But the file system was definitely corrupted.



"wyocowboy" wrote:

>
>
> "Wings" wrote:
>
> > My computer got infected with SpyAxe spyware. When I researched how to get
> > rid of it, one of the first things that was required was to boot into Safe
> > Mode.
> >
> > I attempted to do this. Held down F8 and reached the menu with the Safe
> > Mode options. No matter what I chose (and I tried all of the options on the
> > page, one by one), I would see the DOS messages about files being loaded and
> > then the screen would go black and the system would reboot.
> >
> > At no time did I get any error messages or a BSD – just a reboot.
>
> If your system has service pack 2 installed, one of the choices at the F8
> boot menu should be "disable automatic restart on system crash" or something
> like that. If so, take that option. If not, boot normally into windows.
> Right-click on My Computer (from the start menu, or the desktop) and click on
> Properties - Advanced - Startup and Recovery Settings (button) and clear the
> checkmark next to Automatically Restart. This will cause the system to
> display a blue screen error instead of automatically rebooting (should have
> been the default - Microsoft goof).
>
> > I did a
> > Google search for Safe Mode problems and could not find anything that looked
> > like my symptoms. The only suggestion I found was to get into the Recovery
> > Console and do a chkdsk /r.
> >
> > I tried this and the chkdsk completed with a fairly useless statement that
> > said something like “chkdsk found and repaired one of more errors on the
> > drive”.
> >
> > After this, I discovered that I was unable to do get into Windows. All the
> > system would do was infinitely reboot. I have a BartPE bootable Win XP disk
> > which I loaded up and discovered that I could no longer see my C drive at all
> > (even though the BIOS said it was there).
>
> This is most likely because you have SATA hard drives and a vanilla BartPE
> build only works with IDE drives. You can build a BartPE CD with the
> appropriate drivers for SATA, but you have to download them and slipstream
> them into the new BartPE build.
> >
> > I ran the Seagate disk tools quick test and it came out clean. I finally
> > concluded that the file system was corrupt and since I had no other brilliant
> > ideas, I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled Windows.
>
> The file system was likely ok, even though chkdsk /r found and fixed some
> problems. I usually type 'exit' reboot into recovery console and run chkdsk
> /r again and repeat until it no longer says that it has found and fixed
> problems. I don't know of a good way to find out what it fixed when running
> from recovery console. It might keep a log file, but I don't know where or
> what it is named. The Seagate diagnostic loads the necessary driver to see
> the SATA drive, and you could have browsed some of the hard drive from
> recovery console.
>
> >
> > But…I know this is the 2nd time in the history of this computer that I’ve
> > encountered the “unable to boot into Safe Mode” problem. And I’d really like
> > to know what I should have done about it – since what I did obviously failed.
>
> What is happending is that Windows is crashing when you try to boot into
> safe mode, and since the default setting is to automatically restart, it just
> keeps doing that until you disable the automatic restart.
> >
> > All ideas are welcome. Many thanks.
> >
> > I’m running Win XP Pro on a Shuttle AK31 motherboard with a fairly recent
> > BIOS.
> >
.

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