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Unit boots only to Safe Mode

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by rw.griffin 1 view

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I have a Dell Dimension 3000 unit with Win XP Pro, & recently did an Automatic Update from Microsoft. When the unit re-boots, it will only go into safe mode. I tried Restore, but no access points were listed earlier than 15 min. earlier than my last boot! i cannot find the last updates to remove them & Safe Mode is so limited in it's functions with installed utilities. Any suggestions?

2 replies

by jerry_davis

I think the thing to do in this case would be to uninstall all of the updates that were applied to the OS when the update was ran. If it boots up normally after that then you can install each update one at a time until you hit the one that caused the issue.

It may have also been a bad install of one of the updates. I have seen that quite a few times.

by fadbel

I kinda doubt that you still have the problem after all this time, but if you run into it or something similar in the future, you can insure access to the network to access any updates (MS or others) needed after cleanup. This can be done by selecting "Safe Mode with Networking" after pounding on F8 or, do as I have done and include these two lines in your boot.ini file adjusting, naturally, to your particular partition info.
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="SAFE MODE with Network" /safeboot:network/sos/bootlog
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="SAFE MODE withOUT Network" /safeboot/sos/bootlog
Remember that these two lines (each starts with multi and ends with bootlog) are placed after the existing line in boot.ini.
Don't forget to have the disk ( ) rdisk ( ) and partition ( ) reflect what is in your existing line.
Hope this helps future problems.

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