Can't get into Safe Mode...MESH
 

Hello, and happy Christmas!

As is traditional at this time of year my PC has crashed following installation of a new game. The crash actually happened halfway through a sound card driver update (PC just restarted itself whilst the progress bar was halfway across).

The PC restarted, Windows XP loaded and the User account selection screen appeared. Clicking on any user then briefly displays "Loading settings" then the PC restarts again.

Now, I've used System Restore quite a lot before but always from a Windows environment. I thought I'd give it a try from Safe Mode, but repeatedly pressing F8 during boot-up just brings up the MESH recovery tool, not the usual "How would you like to boot up?" options. Consequently I can't get to Safe Mode or System Restore.

Any ideas? It's a bit sh1t of MESH to make it so tricky to get to a very useful recovery tool.

I've tried ESC and various other combinations of keys on boot up too.

Time to crack open the alcohol I think.:E

I'll give that a try and report back. Thanks! Searches on the internet suggest others have had a similar problem....

Sorted!
 

Right, it's sorted out! Oh the relief.

It was partly luck....and a bit of Mrs. B&t having a go at it too.

We waited until the "For Recovery Press F10" screen came up and then one by one pressed all the F keys, and when that didn't seem to do anything, she pressed the Windows logo key. One of these keys brought up the Windows recovery menu which included the Safe Mode option. I've heard that F8 should do it on this screen for a MESH PC but it wouldn't work when I tried it last time.

I started Windows using Safe Mode, then used System Restore to restore the PC to the most recent good system checkpoint (i.e. before we'd attempted to download the updated driver) - yesterday, as it happened.

Windows restored successfully and is now running normally again! Yes!

Bloody computers.:suspect:

Further update - I had to update the sound card driver by downloading the latest one from the Manufacturer's website then installing it from my PC. The button on the Device Manager tab called "Update driver" for the sound card didn't install the driver correctly (or maybe didn't install the correct driver), brought up a couple of error messages and caused the crash. Using the same method for the graphics card driver worked OK though.....

I won't be making that mistake again. Probably.

For future refence, another way of getting into Safe Mode is go to Start / Run the type in msconfig then hit Enter.
In the System Configuration Utility tick the box called SAFEBOOT.

When you have sorted your problem in Safeboot you'll need to put the SCU back as it was.

Thanks CW. However, Windows didn't get far enough for the Start button to appear, hence the problem!