can't boot into Safe Mode

[Guest]

My computer got infected with SpyAxe spyware. When I researched how to get
rid of it, one of the first things that was required was to boot into Safe
Mode.

I attempted to do this. Held down F8 and reached the menu with the Safe
Mode options. No matter what I chose (and I tried all of the options on the
page, one by one), I would see the DOS messages about files being loaded and
then the screen would go black and the system would reboot.

At no time did I get any error messages or a BSD – just a reboot. I did a
Google search for Safe Mode problems and could not find anything that looked
like my symptoms. The only suggestion I found was to get into the Recovery
Console and do a chkdsk /r.

I tried this and the chkdsk completed with a fairly useless statement that
said something like “chkdsk found and repaired one of more errors on the
driveâ€.

After this, I discovered that I was unable to do get into Windows. All the
system would do was infinitely reboot. I have a BartPE bootable Win XP disk
which I loaded up and discovered that I could no longer see my C drive at all
(even though the BIOS said it was there).

I ran the Seagate disk tools quick test and it came out clean. I finally
concluded that the file system was corrupt and since I had no other brilliant
ideas, I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled Windows.

But…I know this is the 2nd time in the history of this computer that I’ve
encountered the “unable to boot into Safe Mode†problem. And I’d really like
to know what I should have done about it – since what I did obviously failed.

All ideas are welcome. Many thanks.

I’m running Win XP Pro on a Shuttle AK31 motherboard with a fairly recent
BIOS.

 

[Galen]

In Wings <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

My computer got infected with SpyAxe spyware. When I researched how
to get rid of it, one of the first things that was required was to
boot into Safe Mode.

I attempted to do this. Held down F8 and reached the menu with the
Safe Mode options. No matter what I chose (and I tried all of the
options on the page, one by one), I would see the DOS messages about
files being loaded and then the screen would go black and the system
would reboot.

At no time did I get any error messages or a BSD - just a reboot. I
did a Google search for Safe Mode problems and could not find
anything that looked like my symptoms. The only suggestion I found
was to get into the Recovery Console and do a chkdsk /r.

I tried this and the chkdsk completed with a fairly useless statement
that said something like "chkdsk found and repaired one of more
errors on the drive".

After this, I discovered that I was unable to do get into Windows.
All the system would do was infinitely reboot. I have a BartPE
bootable Win XP disk which I loaded up and discovered that I could no
longer see my C drive at all (even though the BIOS said it was there).

I ran the Seagate disk tools quick test and it came out clean. I
finally concluded that the file system was corrupt and since I had no
other brilliant ideas, I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled
Windows.

But.I know this is the 2nd time in the history of this computer that
I've encountered the "unable to boot into Safe Mode" problem. And
I'd really like to know what I should have done about it - since what
I did obviously failed.

All ideas are welcome. Many thanks.

I'm running Win XP Pro on a Shuttle AK31 motherboard with a fairly
recent BIOS.

Maybe a repair install next time instead of a complete reformat?

Repair Installation of XP:
http://kgiii.info/windows/XP/general/xprepair.html

--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/

"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of
existence." - Sherlock Holmes

 

[Guest]

My computer got infected with SpyAxe spyware. When I researched how to get
rid of it, one of the first things that was required was to boot into Safe
Mode.

I attempted to do this. Held down F8 and reached the menu with the Safe
Mode options. No matter what I chose (and I tried all of the options on the
page, one by one), I would see the DOS messages about files being loaded and
then the screen would go black and the system would reboot.

At no time did I get any error messages or a BSD – just a reboot.

If your system has service pack 2 installed, one of the choices at the F8
boot menu should be "disable automatic restart on system crash" or something
like that. If so, take that option. If not, boot normally into windows.
Right-click on My Computer (from the start menu, or the desktop) and click on
Properties - Advanced - Startup and Recovery Settings (button) and clear the
checkmark next to Automatically Restart. This will cause the system to
display a blue screen error instead of automatically rebooting (should have
been the default - Microsoft goof).

I did a
Google search for Safe Mode problems and could not find anything that looked
like my symptoms. The only suggestion I found was to get into the Recovery
Console and do a chkdsk /r.

I tried this and the chkdsk completed with a fairly useless statement that
said something like “chkdsk found and repaired one of more errors on the
driveâ€.

After this, I discovered that I was unable to do get into Windows. All the
system would do was infinitely reboot. I have a BartPE bootable Win XP disk
which I loaded up and discovered that I could no longer see my C drive at all
(even though the BIOS said it was there).

This is most likely because you have SATA hard drives and a vanilla BartPE
build only works with IDE drives. You can build a BartPE CD with the
appropriate drivers for SATA, but you have to download them and slipstream
them into the new BartPE build.

I ran the Seagate disk tools quick test and it came out clean. I finally
concluded that the file system was corrupt and since I had no other brilliant
ideas, I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled Windows.

The file system was likely ok, even though chkdsk /r found and fixed some
problems. I usually type 'exit' reboot into recovery console and run chkdsk
/r again and repeat until it no longer says that it has found and fixed
problems. I don't know of a good way to find out what it fixed when running
from recovery console. It might keep a log file, but I don't know where or
what it is named. The Seagate diagnostic loads the necessary driver to see
the SATA drive, and you could have browsed some of the hard drive from
recovery console.

But…I know this is the 2nd time in the history of this computer that I’ve
encountered the “unable to boot into Safe Mode†problem. And I’d really like
to know what I should have done about it – since what I did obviously failed.

What is happending is that Windows is crashing when you try to boot into
safe mode, and since the default setting is to automatically restart, it just
keeps doing that until you disable the automatic restart.

 

[Guest]

Regarding what wyocowboy wrote:

1. yes I have SP 2 installed. And I did not see anything at the F8 prompt
about “disable automatic restart….â€. But I can certainly look for the
setting in windows to disable the auto restart.
2. The system uses IDE drives – not SATA. So BartPE should have been able
to see the drives.
3. I tried to do a reinstall of XP after the chkdsk (the type of reinstall
without the formatting) however XP insisted there was no partition on the
drive. I could not do anything with the repair or reinstall because it
insisted there was no partition there. That was why I ended up with the full
reformat.
4. After reformatting and reinstalling XP I discovered that the 2nd drive on
my system (also IDE and used solely for backup) was also corrupted. In the
disk management tools in XP it indicated there was no partition there. No
drive letter was assigned. This is consistent with what BartPE found .
Apparently the file system on the backup drive was corrupted too!!!! I was
able to recover data from this drive using some file recovery software that I
own. But the file system was definitely corrupted.

 

[Guest]

Regarding what wyocowboy wrote:

1. yes I have SP 2 installed. And I did not see anything at the F8 prompt
about “disable automatic restart….â€. But I can certainly look for the
setting in windows to disable the auto restart.

I'm not sure that sp2 automatically adds that to the boot menu, but I've
noticed that it does appear on at least some systems that have sp2 installed,
and it did not appear on any systems that have sp1. I work in a computer
repair shop and see the boot menu on a lot of computers because I typically
boot into safe mode first thing, when I am removing malware. I have not made
it a practice to look for this boot option on all sp2 machines, but I will
from now on. I now suspect that it may only appear on OEM machines as a
convinience to their tech support. When xp gets stuck in the reboot loop, if
this option isn't there, the only recourse to find out what the error is is
to boot with BartPE (with the remote registry editing tool included) and
change that setting in the registry. I was hoping that MS would change that
default in sp2, as it makes absolutely no sense to have the system
automatically reboot on system crash.

2. The system uses IDE drives – not SATA. So BartPE should have been able
to see the drives.

See below.

3. I tried to do a reinstall of XP after the chkdsk (the type of reinstall
without the formatting) however XP insisted there was no partition on the
drive. I could not do anything with the repair or reinstall because it
insisted there was no partition there. That was why I ended up with the full
reformat.

Ok, this explains why BartPE didn't see the drive - the drive has to have a
fat32 or ntfs partition to be visible to BartPE (or xp for that matter).

4. After reformatting and reinstalling XP I discovered that the 2nd drive on
my system (also IDE and used solely for backup) was also corrupted. In the
disk management tools in XP it indicated there was no partition there. No
drive letter was assigned. This is consistent with what BartPE found .
Apparently the file system on the backup drive was corrupted too!!!! I was
able to recover data from this drive using some file recovery software that I
own. But the file system was definitely corrupted.

It sounds like you have had problems other than spyaxe. Spyaxe is scumware
that purports to be a spyware remover, and while the mode of its installation
and the difficulty of its removal are problematic, their aim is not to
corrupt your disks or files system, and I've . It sounds like you have some
sort of hardware problem, such as bad ram or faulty IDE 'controllers' on your
mainboard, assuming that both hard drives pass the manufacturers'
diagnostics. Or the corruption was caused by a damaged xp.

There are typically two levels of h/d diags - quick and full. Make sure to
run 'full' on both. While they typically warn about backing up your data
first, I've never seen the full diags affect data, as they mostly just try to
read the entire disk. Do not select any test that says it writes to the disk,
as it may overwrite xp or data files.

If you want to run a memory diagnostic, there is a good free one here...

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp