[Jsmith0258]

I'm not gonna lie to you guys, this is all going down on a computer that is not mine, I'm at work and I'm at a loss of what to do, so any and all help you can give me is VERY appreciated. I'm really worried about this one.

So I was doing some admin stuff on a computer installing a program, but it was having trouble so the guide that I was reffered to told me to boot up in safe mode. Against my better judgement I did it the way it said instead of the way I was familiar with ( F8 ). The way it told me how to do it was to go into msconfig and check the box for safe mode. I think that actually modifies the system.inf or whatever the file is.

Now... the problem is that this is a computer on a network, and network users are the only people who log onto it. In the past I've tried to log into it using safe mode and everytime my logins won't work and I just restart and choose "safemode with networking" which works great.

The problem is that now it automatically goes to just regular "minimum safe mode" no matter what I do, restart/turn off/choose a different option under F8. I've also tried to guess some local usernames/password (administrator, admin, user, guest for the username spot, for the password spot variation of the word password, the same word typed again, or just leaving password blank) but none of them have worked. If I could figure out one of these we could probably get it to go, but I don't know if anyone has even logged into this one locally in years.

Now that's pretty scary to begin with but on top of that the laptop doesn't have a floppy or CD drive. This is not good... There is valuable information on this laptop, in fact it's the laptop of my boss. Needless to say I'm a little stressed, your quick responses are very appreciated!

Running Windops XP Tablet PC Edition SP2

Let me know any other information you guys need.Thanks!

[rvalstar]

I was looking to see if it really modified system.inf or the registry or ???

My best guess is if you can find where this is set then either mount as slave on another machine or use a BartPE (not possible w/out a bootable CD on the machine) to undo this then boot normally and be happy.

[justinmirsky]

I believe that this just adds /safeboot:minimal to the boot.ini. From your setup I believe that you will need to do what Rick said and pull the HDD drive out and put it in some type of enclosure or mount it in another computer somehow. Browse to the root of that drive and modify the boot.ini file. You may have to show hidden files to be able to see the file and you may have to remove the "read only" attribute to be able to modify it. Once you open up the boot.ini remove the /safeboot option.

If you do not have some sort of enclosure for the drive there are some very nice USB to IDE adapters out there that you can purchase, something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812119017
If you have further questions let us know! best of luck