Problems getting to safe mode.

[13thmonkey]

During an nvidia driver update yesterday my machine bluescreened.

First thought was get into safe mode, uninstall video drivers, reinstall video drivers all will be ok. I can't get into safe mode.
Second thought, restore from backup, but because my machine has been unplugged since may the backups on WHS have been managed away, and since pugging it in it had not completed a full backup. The incomplete backups do not include c:\
Third thought, edit the the boot loader so that it forces it into safe mode... the question is how?

 

[C12Friedman]

Pull up your command prompt and enter msconfig. Select the "Boot" tab, one of the options there will be "Start in Safe Mode". That should work

 

[13thmonkey]

Can't get into windows at all. goes past the logo screen and bluescreens with a variety of messages, can't get to F8 fast enough to hit the options for safe mode, hence wanting to mod the bootloader, but has to be from outside of windows. Stable up until now, so I assuming this is corruption due to the driver install failure.

 

[C12Friedman]

I think I might suggest pulling the graphics card then and seeing if you can get a clean boot without it. Since "Safe Mode" is a function of Windows, I am unaware of any way to enable that feature without Windows at least starting to load. If no joy removing the graphics card, then I'd go to SeaTools for DOS or WD's Lifeguard

 

[13thmonkey]

I've managed to get to bcdedit from the repair functions and have altered the timeout to let me manually get into safe mode, and safe mode works!

Fingers are crossed...

 

[13thmonkey]

Uninstalling nvidia drivers in safe mode seems to have worked, now just to reinstall them, and do a full backup!

 

[C12Friedman]

I've managed to get to bcdedit from the repair functions and have altered the timeout to let me manually get into safe mode, and safe mode works!

Fingers are crossed...

Nice, I hadn't considered that approach at all (I kinda feel dumb now)

 

[13thmonkey]

I was trying to that last night, and getting nowhere with the syntax, but it turned out I had a boot option with 0 delay on so F8 wouldn't work, couldn't force safe mode, but could change the timeout when I re-tackled it this morning. Thanks for trying sounding out the problem probably helped.