Sunday, April 27, 2008

Adding "Safe Boot" Menu Option in Boot Menu

It is common to boot into safe mode when you're experiencing problems with Windows XP and want to troubleshoot. However I didn't liked the whole procedure that one has to follow to boot into safe mode (like you must press [F8], and then you must select Safe Mode from yet another menu).

Wouldn't it be nice if Booting into Safe Mode was available from the Boot menu? So, let's add a little option of booting into safe mode in the Boot Menu itself.

Just follow the steps:

  1. Open Boot.ini (Start->Run->"C:\boot.ini")
  2. Now under "[operating systems]", locate the line that ends with the "/fastdetect".
  3. Now copy the whole line and paste it in a new line below.
  4. Now in this new line, change the text which says WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" into WINDOWS="Safe Mode".
  5. Remove any other text which follows after that and in the end add this "/safeboot:minimal /sos /bootlog" (without quotes). (see the example figure below)

    add boot into safe mode in boot menu
    Click for larger view
  6. Save and Reboot to test.

Note: If for some reason the menu is not shown at startup, read here as how to change the boot menu time since it might be zero.

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