Accessing Safe Mode

[cmichael258]

It's my understanding that F8 during boot up gets you to the option of entering Safe Mode; however, when I do this it takes me to the screen to chose the boot order for my various drives. I know that hitting delete gets me to the BIOS screen, F10 and ESCAPE do nothing.

Any suggestions?

ASUS M2N-E
AMD 64x 2 4600
2GB 6400 DDR2 Patriot memory
NVIDIA Geforce 7600 GT
Maxtor 250GB SATA HD
Plextor CD-R
SONY DVD-RW

[GaryRouth]

Hi cmichael258

There is likely a message-banner at startup that displays during the time period for altering the boot order, or entering Bios Setup. See if you can wait until just after that message disappears, and then start tapping F8 to see the Boot Menu to enter Safe Mode.

Should you continue to have trouble using the keyboard to access Safe Mode, there is a trick you can use to force Windows XP to start in Safe Mode = you use the "System Configuration Utility" (msconfig) and place a checkmark in a box next to an option ("/SAFEBOOT") in the "Boot.ini" tab. Here's a link to a webpage with a step-by-step walk-through of the process --- http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstr...msysconfig.htm

Once you are finished with your work in Safe Mode, you can then simply remove the checkmark to return to the normal boot behavior.

Best of luck
. . . Gary

[cmichael258]

Thanks Gary. I'll wait a bit before hitting the F8 tab to see if that works. If not, I'll use the alternative suggestion via MSCONFIG.
Thanks for your assistance!
Michael