Cannot get out of Safe Mode

[Hermon]

I tried to re-install Windows XP keep getting
message."Window setup will restarting becuase it is in
safe mode. Cannot get system out of safe mode to get re-
install to continue. Keeps restarting over and over again.
How can I get Windows Setup to finish.

 

[cww]

I haven't been able to find an answer on this for a long
time since it seems to be one that comes up occassionally
with every OS. It might be possible that it is set in the
boot.ini to use /safemode but I'm not sure yet. I asked
the same question yesterday and didn't get any answer back
so good luck getting one. If it is running FAT/FAT32 you
should be able to get it booted to DOS and look at the
boot.ini in the Root of your drive. You might try looking
at System.ini and Windows.ini and see if it might be in
there. Other than that it might be in the registry.

 

[bhisham]

first of all don't run windows xp setup in safe-mode
becuse in safe mode som eimportant services are disabled.
boot from the dos mode by bootable cd-rom and then re-run
setup.

 

[cww]

Well considering I've seen this happen first hand
yesterday (different PC) I know he wasn't running XP setup
while in Safe Mode. I can't say how his happened but mine
happened when I tried to perform a repair. My guess is
that Windows knew it was having a problem and had set it
to Safe Mode like Win9x used to do if improperly shut down.

I just fixed mine this morning. The problem was it had
it set in the boot.ini and for some reason the F8 options
for Normal weren't removing the line. For some reason it
is using something like /safemode:minimal. Example:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft
Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /safemode:minimal

All that needs done is to remove the /safemode:minimal
command and reboot and it will continue the setup like it
should. However, the problem exists in that if you are
running NTFS then you may have some problems editing that
file. I haven't tried it from the Console to see if it
could be done but instead used ERD Commander 2002 to edit
the file. And in my case the problem was solved in under
5 minutes and I didn't lose any of the customers data or
software installations or configs.