Only Boots In Safe Mode

mandm6 · Post by **mandm6** » Sun May 06, 2007 1:45 pm

Hi peeps, Have another problem that i'm sure you can help with. My nephew bought over his Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. It has windows xp home installed on it. Everytime you turn on the computer, It boots in safe mode. He does not have any disks that came with it. It also will not let you change much because its in the safe mode. I'm sure its eat up with viruses. I have a xp home cd and was going to try that but it will not let me install that because it says the version on the puter is newer. It also will not let me connect to the net to try and find a program to run and get rid of the crap. What can I do to install the disk i have? After messing with it for 5 hrs, I give up and take it to you guys.Thanks for any help you can give me..
Kevin

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Sun May 06, 2007 2:35 pm

reboot the laptop.. enter bios, set it to boot from CD, put your Disk in and let it format and reinstall using the XPhome key that is on the sticker on his laptop or his product key.. then update everything and your set

mandm6 · Post by **mandm6** » Sun May 06, 2007 2:43 pm

He has no product key...I have one thats with theXp home disk i have. Think i tried that but it still would not work..I'll try again. Do I need to shut it down with the disk in it after i change it in the bios and then restart it?

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Sun May 06, 2007 2:45 pm

Have you tried a system restore?

mandm6 · Post by **mandm6** » Sun May 06, 2007 2:49 pm

He did not have it enabled

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Sun May 06, 2007 2:51 pm

That'll learn him.

Have you slaved the drive to a healthy computer that has updated good antivirus, and all windows updates, and run a scan?

mandm6 · Post by **mandm6** » Sun May 06, 2007 2:54 pm

Not sure how to do that cat..Sorry

mandm6 · Post by **mandm6** » Sun May 06, 2007 3:45 pm

Sava700 wrote:reboot the laptop.. enter bios, set it to boot from CD, put your Disk in and let it format and reinstall using the XPhome key that is on the sticker on his laptop or his product key.. then update everything and your set

Just tried that Sava. Changed it to boot only from cd and when it came up,It was still in the safe mode. Also i clicked on run to install the disk from there and the screen came up but again when i clicked on install WIN XP HOME, Said the version on the laptop was newer and would not continue. Its a Sp1 disk but there has to be a way to wipe the hdd and install the sp1 and then do the updates?

BOWTYE8 · Post by **BOWTYE8** » Mon May 07, 2007 8:03 pm

Are you able to boot from CD?
When loading XP from CD it will first load some drivers may take about 2+ minutes. Then should have a blue screen to load windows. It may say there is a version of windows on the drive but there should be a chioce to install a fresh copy. Then you should also be able to format. It may say pick a partician,create a partician, del partician. You can chose del partician.
Then you will have to create the partician....format it and it should load windows.
I only have a version of winxp and XP sp1. It will load on every computer and then update to sp2.

another idea like mentioned in earilier post is to run antivirus on the drive. Can you boot to safe mode with networking. Do you have a router. You can share the drive on the lappy. Then try accessing via another computer on the network. If you can see it. you should be able to right click and scan it with your virus software.
Good luck..keep us posted.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Mon May 07, 2007 8:10 pm

mandm6 wrote:Not sure how to do that cat..Sorry

Take hard drive out of bad PC
Take a good PC that's updated...and has a quality antivirus program on it. Unplug the CD-ROM on that PC, and replace it (temporarily) with the bad hard drive. Or if its a SATA hard drive..just plug it in.

Now boot up the good PC...and by going through My Computer, the bad hard drive will show up as the next available drive letter...scan and clean it.

BOWTYE8 · Post by **BOWTYE8** » Mon May 07, 2007 8:16 pm

YeOldeStonecat wrote:Take hard drive out of bad PC
Take a good PC that's updated...and has a quality antivirus program on it. Unplug the CD-ROM on that PC, and replace it (temporarily) with the bad hard drive. Or if its a SATA hard drive..just plug it in.

Now boot up the good PC...and by going through My Computer, the bad hard drive will show up as the next available drive letter...scan and clean it.

YeOlde..I believe its a laptop... A little harder to scan as a IDE or Sata.

Not sure if norton is a bootable scan. I know 2004 and 2007 ask to prescan before installation but that is also within windows running.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Mon May 07, 2007 8:36 pm

Theres also the UBCD for Windows, you can run adaware and spybot from there. Along with other tools.

mandm6 · Post by **mandm6** » Mon May 07, 2007 9:38 pm

BOWTYE8 wrote:Are you able to boot from CD?
When loading XP from CD it will first load some drivers may take about 2+ minutes. Then should have a blue screen to load windows. It may say there is a version of windows on the drive but there should be a chioce to install a fresh copy. Then you should also be able to format. It may say pick a partician,create a partician, del partician. You can chose del partician.
Then you will have to create the partician....format it and it should load windows.
I only have a version of winxp and XP sp1. It will load on every computer and then update to sp2.

another idea like mentioned in earilier post is to run antivirus on the drive. Can you boot to safe mode with networking. Do you have a router. You can share the drive on the lappy. Then try accessing via another computer on the network. If you can see it. you should be able to right click and scan it with your virus software.
Good luck..keep us posted.

Even booting from a cd it boots up in the safe mode. It will not boot up in safe mode with networking. Never seen anything like it. It will not connect to the net at all. I was able to run a version of adaware and spybot and they removed a bunch of stuff. I also got a trial version of macfee to run on it and it removed 14 trojans but it still just boots up in the safe mode. It will not give me the option to continue installing the xp disk i have..

Norm · Post by **Norm** » Tue May 08, 2007 1:06 am

Download "Autoruns"
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysint ... oruns.mspx
Run it.
When the "Options" button finally appears at the top of the autoruns window it means the scan is done click it (the options button), and check "Hide Microsoft entries". Then close autoruns, run it again. Hiding MS entries will make the list far shorter to deal with, and MS files are not usually the culprit.

Go through all the listed entries looking for odd ones that have no publisher name, or say "file not found", or anything your gut tells you isn't right.
Check off all those suspect entries so they don't execute when you reboot.
Close autoruns, and reboot. Start in "Normal mode"

Any changes you make can be undone if you run autoruns again and uncheck the entries you checked earlier. It runs in safe mode, so no worries.

Most problems I have found with similar safe mode only boots tend to pint to a virus/trojan, or a piece of hard ware like network card, or Video card. Either bad hardware, or bad drivers.

If you can somehow post the results of the autoruns scan (either a screenshot, or a saved log), I may be able to pinpoint some bad entries since I have used it for quite a while, and have many years of getting to know what files are legit by their names etc.

If I can't get back to you (I'm off to see the wizard, not sure how long I'll be, possibly months), look for a guy named TonyT here at speedguide. He is also very good at analizing an autoruns scan.

TonyT · Post by **TonyT** » Tue May 08, 2007 8:08 am

In the event autoruns cannot be downloaded or cannot be run, do this:
1. boot into safe mode
2. Start > Run > regedit
3. navigate to HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current version/Run
4. rt click the Run folder and select "Export".
4a. save it as "current-user-run.reg".
5. the export HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current version/Policies/Explorer
5a. save it as "current-user-explorer.reg".
6. then export HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current version/Run
6a. save it as "local-mach-run.reg".
8. then export HKLM/Software/Microsoft/WindowsNT/Current version/Winlogon/Notify
8a. save it as "notify.reg".
9. copy all of these exported registry exports to a floppy or cd or usb drive.
10. open them in Notepad in another computer and copy+paste the contents here in this thread.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue May 08, 2007 8:13 am

BOWTYE8 wrote:YeOlde..I believe its a laptop... A little harder to scan as a IDE or Sata.

Ahh...laptop. I use an Apricorn adapter to slave/scan laptop drives. But for the one-time home user..not cost effective.

Genesis · Post by **Genesis** » Thu May 17, 2007 3:08 am

Have you tried checking if the Boot.ini file was edited? Its located in your root C:\ drive. However; in order to view it youll have to have show hidden files enabled and "Hide System Files" UNCHECKED, under your folder options. Make sure the boot sector does NOT have an extension that ends in /safemode or /safeboot if it does then no matter what you choose you wont be able to boot to normal mode. Hope it helps.

beej_johnson · Post by **beej_johnson** » Thu May 24, 2007 9:54 am

Hello, Have you tried using Ultimate Boot Cd yet? The reason I ask this is if your BOIS is set to boot from CD only then if this cd is in the drive then it will boot at cmd level before the kernel is even looked at. Then if you are comfortable with Derik Boot and Nuke, then i would recommend using it to format and then install the new OS. Just an idea. Good luck with it.

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Thu May 24, 2007 10:09 am

umm this thread is like 3 weeks old.. i'm sure if he hasn't posted back by now its prob working...

kahnjob · Post by **kahnjob** » Wed Jul 27, 2011 1:28 am

I'm having a similar issue. However, there are some differences. First, the computer will not boot into any other mode, primarily because the hard drive is looking the Windows profile files and cannot find them as there are approximately 9 sectors that have been corrupted somehow. The first 92% of the hard drive checks out using software that checks block by block with 512 blocks per sector or FAT 32. Going back to the last known good profile doesn't work no matter how far back one goes as these are the files more than likely corrupted. Additionally, booting from the Dell recovery disk by changing the BIOS just boots the computer. It will not allow one to reinstall Windows XP professional because the booting process leaves one in the safe mode and leaves a dumb message that one must be in a mode other than the safe mode which leaves me at square one. The hard drive has about 37% free space and been defragmented and optimized. Generally, I get the blue screen of death when booting to safe mode with networking. I also have Lacie backup software which is basically worthless as it doesn't permit the complete restoration of a hard drive image, only directory by directory. This software is as useless as the Dell recovery CD. No more Dell laptops for me. I’ve had this piece of garbage for 5 and 1/2 years replacing the motherboard twice and the LCD screen once under warranty luckily.

Does anyone have any ideas?

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