Unintended consequences of configuring a PC to run on safe mode

One of the user wanted to run her PC on safe mode for some reasons, so she went ahead and clicked Start-->>Run and then typed in MSCONFIG -->OK…


system configuration utility popped up..


She went ahead and clicked BOOT.INI tab then checked SAFEBOOT --> OK. That action made her PC to boot in safe mode and that is exactly what she wanted! But the problem was she was not able to log back in her computer by using her domain username and password and to put icing on the cake she could not even remember what her local username and password were either. There was no way she could login her machine and she did not!

Lesson learned
If you want to run on safe mode please restart you computer and while it is starting press F8 button a couple times, if you do it right, the black dos window will pop up, use the up and down arrow keys to move up and down the selection --> select safe mode and then hit --> enter --> select your OS and hit --> Enter again… boom you computer will start in safe mode. When you are all done with whatever you were doing in safe mode, restart your computer, it should start in a normal “mode”

How did we fix it?
We pulled her SATA Hard drive out of her computer and then installed it as slave HDD into another computer then from there we accessed her BOOT.INI file --> opened it with notepad --> and then in the Operating system section in the boot.ini file we removed /safemode:minimal “switch”.

Remember to backup your original BOOT.INI file before you make any changes because you may need to use the original one should the modified Boot.ini file fail.

Here is how our safe mode BOOT.INI looked like
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /safeboot:minimal

And here is s how the normal BOOT.INI file should look like or rather contain
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect