Beginners Guides: Safe Mode in Windows Vista For Crash Recovery

It's happened to all of us. You've been using your computer the same way for months, then all of a sudden you sit down to work, turn the system on and... What? Windows Vista starts to load and then things go wrong. Maybe your computer endlessly restarts on the Windows loading screen.

Maybe your system loads into Vista, but so slowly as to be useless. Maybe you get a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) instead of a welcome screen... Something is badly wrong with your operating system and you need to get work done. You take the computer to a local PC service center and they say the only sure way to fix it is to reinstall Windows Vista. The only problem with that is you'd lose all your family photos and personal files you haven't ever gotten around to backing up. What to do? First of all - Don't Panic. The answer to your troubles may be closer to hand than you think. In this case, a little DIY can save your data and your dollars, so read on.

This PCSTATS Guide is designed to provide the average computer user with the tools to repair his or her Vista operating system and access files in an emergency, using almost nothing but Windows Vista's own inbuilt tools and utilities. All of this is done through the most useful of all these tools, the Windows Safe Mode option.

Windows Vista, like all recent Microsoft operating systems, includes a 'safe mode' boot option. Safe mode is a method of loading the operating system stripped down to the bare core of functionality, without the various extra graphical options, startup software and functionality of a full Vista boot. Most software will not work in the Vista safe-mode, which is precisely why this option is so useful when troubleshooting a crashed computer.

The Three Safe Modes of Windows Vista

As you will see, there are three distinct Safe Mode types available in Windows Vista; 'safe mode', 'safe mode with networking' and 'safe mode with command prompt only'. Let's outline the differences and capabilities of each version first, and then we'll tell you how to engage Safe Mode, and why it is such a powerful recovery tool.

First: Safe Mode

The default option, 'safe mode' is where we will spend most of our time in this article. As detailed above, a minimal set of hardware drivers is loaded on boot up when the computer is told to run in safe mode. Incidently, hardware drivers are the software that lets Windows Vista make use of the physical devices in the computer, such as the hard drive or video card. The drivers loaded include all hard disk and CD-Rom devices, keyboard and mouse, A basic video driver to display graphics on the screen, and USB storage device support for USB flash drives and card readers.

Note that no printing support or network connections are available in this mode.

A limited selection of services (operating system processes that run in the background) are also started, bare essentials such as the event log, Windows Defender and encryption support for reading protected files.

Second: Safe Mode with Networking

This is the same as 'safe mode' above, with the addition of hardware support for the computer system's wired and wireless network adapters. Thus you can access the Internet or your local network freely in this mode, though you will find performance to be slower than it would normally be in normal Vista operation.

The addition of network hardware support means that several other services must be started, including the DNS, DHCP (see PCSTATS Beginners Guide to networking for more information on these terms) and firewall services.

Third: Safe Mode with Command Prompt

Safe mode with command prompt loads safe mode as above, but without the graphical interface, giving you only the command prompt. Generally speaking, this is only really useful to system administrators who need to quickly enter a few text-based commands in safe mode, as there are very, very few situations where the safe mode with command prompt mode will work when the other safe modes will not.

PCSTATS will not further explore the use of this command prompt mode, as it is outside the scope of this article.

© 2023 PCSTATS.com Please respect the time and effort that went into creating each PCSTATS Beginners Guide, do not illegally copy. Thank you.

Next Page >