Practicing the Black Art (04/04)
Adding Safe Mode To Your Windows XP Boot Menu
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Entering Safe Mode in XP requires that you press the F8 key soon after you turn your computer on, but before you get to the Desktop. Sometimes you need to start your computer more than once before you succeed. That's because most us aren't sure exactly how far along in the startup sequence we need to be before it's possible to enter Safe Mode.
If you find yourself using Safe Mode a lot or want to get there easily at every startup, you can add the Safe Mode option to your boot menu. You will never have to repeatedly tap the F8 key again to gain access.
The procedure is very simple. All you need to do is add a line to your boot.ini file. This is a file that the start-up procedure looks at in order to determine which partition or operating system the computer needs. Access it by right clicking My Computer, going to Properties, clicking the Advanced tab, and then the Settings tab. Under the Startup and Recovery section, click the Edit button which will open up the boot.ini file in Notepad. Examine it and you will see your Windows XP system listed there. It will look something like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
Select and copy the entire line and paste it as a new separate line under it, so you have two lines the same, ie:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
Edit the line you pasted by changing the words "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" to something like "XP Safe Mode". Use any phrase you like. This is the item you will see on your boot menu.
Next add this line to the END of the line you pasted: /safeboot:minimal /sos /bootlog
Save your changes and that's it. The two lines, using the above the example, should now look like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="XP Safe Mode" /fastdetect /safeboot:minimal /sos /bootlog
To make sure you didn't make any errors:
- Click Start / Run and type MSCONFIG in the text portion of the Run dialog box.
- Click the Boot.ini tab.
- Click the Check all Boot Paths button.
You should get a message that looks like this:
A different dialog box will appear if you spelled anything wrong or if the boot path isn't correct. When the system determines that all is well, entering Safe Mode will be easy. :
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Copyright 2004. This article is from the April 2004 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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