[Ham-Computers] Booting into safe mode

[Duane Fischer, W8DBF]

Loren was correct. An emergency boot disc should have been made by the owner as soon as the system was up and running.    
    
However, as details come out, it appears he made some serious mistakes when he tried to update a friends computer. Time to call in a Pro before more damage happens -    

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: WA5CAB at cs.com 
  To: ham-computers at mailman.qth.net 
  Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 10:07 PM
  Subject: Re: [Ham-Computers] Booting into safe mode


  Brian,

  I believe that you said originally that the machine was running some variety of XP.  None of which will fit on a floppy disk.  However, if you have the original OS CD, you should be able to boot from that.  It will only load generic drivers.  

  Put the OS CD into the drive and turn the machine on.  If it still tries to boot from the hard drive, power down and next time take it into Setup.  On some machines it may take several attempts before you find the magic key as the message and opportunity to press the key or keys often appear for only a second or less.  Once you have it into Setup, go to Boot settings or something similar and change the boot device sequence so that CD preceeds HD.  Then once more into the breach and you should have it up probably with video in 640 x 480 VGA mode.  At that point you should have some options but what they are will depend upon what's on the CD or who supplied it.  One will probably be to re-install the OS from scratch but don't do that one if there is anything on the C: drive that you want to save.

  Robert Downs - Houston
  wa5cab dot com (Web Store)
  MVPA 9480 


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