• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Computer boots only into safe mode

C

ChaseJ86

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 11, 2003
Messages
320
I have my aunts computer at my place trying to figure out what's wrong with it, but I can't figure it out. Apparently her computer had a backdoor opened by an attacker/virus and now her computer will only boot into safe mode. No windows updates were done on it (except for SP1, which came with the OS). Unfortunatly, I am unable to access my dsl from her computer because it is in safe mode. I tried booting it into safe mode with networking but it was a no go.
She had put, from a floppy, the fix it tools for Klez and Keltern (sp?) viruses, which I ran and it found nothing.
I need to run windows update on the computer but am unable to from her computer. I remember seeing a post here about how to configure windowsupdate.com so that it will only download the updates and not install them, so that you could burn them onto a cd. How can I configure windowsupdate to do this?

Does this problem sound familiar to anyone? I can only hope its happened before and someone here has the knowledge to tell me how to fix it.

I cannot format the computer because my aunt has valuable info on her computer, and it is too big for a floppy and i cannot burn it, because safe mode won't allow me to.

Computer specs:
HP Pavilion 542
Windows XP Home with sp1
AMD Athlon xp 1800+
Motherboard unkown (integrated video, sound and LAN)
30gb hardrive
256mb ram

Thanks for your help.
 
did she change anything in the registry to make it boot to safemood?
 
I just talked to her on the phone and she says this started yesterday when she got a "return email notification" stating that an address she specified in one of her e-mails was invalid and was sent back to her. The problem was, she never sent that e-mail. She then contacted her e-mail provider (Juno) and asked what was going on and Juno said it was mostlikely the Klez (or Kleg?) virus and then gave her a link to the symantec fix it tool. She downloaded it and was told to go into safe mode by the fix it program and run it. She did, and it came back with no results. Now the computer is stuck in safe mode, and will not get out.

I figured out how to download the windows updates, so I will burn those and put them onto the computer and see if this helps.

She had also called HP Tech support and the guy she was talking to had only heard of this situation only once and was never notified by that other person how they fixed it.
 
Go to Control Panel -> System -> User Profile -> Advance Tab -> Startup and Recovery.

What's listed under default operating system?
is it [ "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /safeboot ] ?

if so open up Notepad and then open the boot.ini file
located in the root of your C: drive

replace /safeboot with /fastdetect
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top