Posted by Max Baun on Tue, Aug 26, 2008 @ 08:55 AM
So you sit down in front of your computer, turn it on, and you start to hear the Jaws music?!?!?! It gets louder and louder until, the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) appears on your monitor. It says that your Windows system has been shut down to prevent any further damage. Most of the time, the BSoD appears without any sign of the problem before. Usually it has to do with a recent software or hardware driver installation. It seems pretty ridiculous that you
have no way of recovering your system because of the driver for your new USB keyboard had bugs in it. What can you do?
Luckily Windows put in an advanced startup option called Safe Mode. Essentially, this starts up the operating system, but with very simple drivers. Windows boots to a file called system.cb instead of the normal system file. This loads virtual device drivers that can communicate with parts of the computer.
Once in Safe Mode, you can locate and fix the problems with tools like the Device Manager. Safe Mode usually recognizes your wireless and wired Ethernet cards so you can connect to the internet and download the newest d
evice drivers for your hardware if this was the source of the problem. If the problem comes from a recently installed program you can use the Add/Remove Programs.
In addition to a graphical to the Safe Mode, you can also boot Safe Mode with the Command Prompt. If you know there is a corrupted file due to a virus or malware, you can navigate through the directory structure, delete the corrupted files, and replace them with copies of the clean version. This method usually works best with problems due to corruption in the system files or registry.