Stuck booting to safe mode - no video

[walleymo]

Hey everyone,

I am in desperate need of help! I was enlisted to remove some viruses from a Dell laptop with a bad lcd. It needs to be hooked up with VGA to work, there are no other video out options.

I initially booted fine into 7, then shut down to get into safe mode.

Well I was trying to get into safe mode by hitting F8, but nothing would show up on my monitor before the Welcome screen. So I did a very stupid thing. I changed the setting in MSConfig to safe boot with networking. I'm kicking myself, because I get no video on my monitor at all now. It's been one of those days.

So the only two options I can think of are to edit the registry from a second computer with this drive as an external. Or, I could buy a USB to VGA (or HDMI) adapter.

I found an entry in the registry for "Safe boot" but it's not obvious to me what to do from there. Does anybody have an idea of what I would change in the registry, what I would change it to, or is that setting even in the registry?

Or, does anyone know if a USB to VGA adapter would even boot into safe mode?

I'm grateful for any advice, cause I'm freaking out here.

Thanks,
Jon

 

[Malignant PC]

Try booting while repeatedly pressing F8 get the advanced boot options menu. From here you can run VGA mode or last known good configuration. Read the manual on the laptop model so you can find out how to access those options.


Check out this thread:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/32195-63-external-monitor-work-safe-mode

 

[walleymo]

Thanks for the reply. I just got it working by removing the laptop's LCD cable, then hooking up the external monitor. Apparently these Inspirons have issues with video.