Matt Bowcock // mbowcock.com

I ran into an issue last night where I changed the boot options for XP using MSCONFIG (foolishly) to enter safemode.  After doing this the computer would blue screen when booting and then attempt to boot back into safe mode.  I didn’t have a XP disc to enter recovery mode so I ended at google trying to find some sort of boot/recovery disc and found - ERD Commander from Micrsoft (30 day eval) - which has some great tools on it.  I ended up making an ERD boot disc and restored to a restore point to fix the BSOD issue.  After the restore I rebooted and found the computer booted correctly but I couldn’t log into the Admin account.  (This is a company laptop and the admins changed the admin password to something new - so I thought I was screwed.)  I tried booting the different boot options -  ‘Last known good configuration’, ‘Windows XP Normally’, etc. but no luck.

I tried resetting the admin password with the ‘locksmith’ utility in ERD but for whatever reason I couldn’t get it to work.  Back to Google - I tried to find a way to reset the admin password - and found plenty of tools to reset the account but none seemed to work.

At this point the system was booting fine so I didn’t care about getting into safe mode but I since I set the options in MSCONFIG (won’t do that again) I couldn’t get around them.  I tried running MSCONFIG when I booting using the ERD Commander boot disc but it didn’t work - I could get the app to run - but it wouldn’t save the changes.  Next I try running bootcfg from the command line - using this I can remove all options from the boot config except for /SAFEBOOT:MINIMAL - WTF?  So then I figure why not just edit the boot config by hand?  I don’t know why it took me so long to get to that point - I could have done that initially and saved myself a lot of time .  After booting using the ERD Commander CD - I went to the file explorer and navigated to the root (C:\) and changed the properties of boot.ini to writable (uncheck ‘Read-Only’).  I then edited to remove the /SAFEBOOT:MINIMAL switch, saved the file, and rebooted - back to Windows as normal.

All in all this was a pain in the ass (and a little embarrassing but I’m sharing it here so it wasn’t that bad).