Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft Windows XP [Electronic resources]

Paul McFedries

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Controlling Startup with the Advanced Options Menu

When the OS Choices menu appears at startup, you see the following message at the bottom of the screen:

For troubleshooting and advanced startup options for Windows, press F8.

Tip

If you have only one operating system installed on your computer, the OS Choices menu won’t appear. To display the Advanced Options menu in this case, press F8 after your computer completes its Power-On Self Test (usually indicated by a single beep) but before the Windows XP logo is displayed.

This message remains on the screen while the progress bar that tracks the loading of startup devices is displayed. If you press F8, you get to the Advanced Options menu, which looks like this:

Windows Advanced Options Menu  Please select an option:        Safe Mode  
    Safe Mode with Networking      Safe Mode with Command Prompt     
   Enable Boot Logging  
    Enable VGA Mode    
  Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings        
  that worked)
Directory Services Restore Mode (Windows domain controllers only)
Debugging Mode        Start Windows Normally      Reboot   
   Return to OS Choices Menu

The Start Windows Normally option loads Windows XP in the usual fashion. You use the other options to control the rest of the startup procedure. Table 4-1 lists each advanced option and shows the corresponding Boot.ini switches.

Table 4-1: Advanced Options menu choices and their corresponding Boot.ini switches
Advanced Option	Boot.ini Switch (If Any)
Safe Mode	/safeboot:minimal /bootlog /noguiboot /sos
Safe Mode With Networking	/safeboot:network /bootlog /noguiboot /sos
Safe Mode With Command Prompt	/safeboot:minimal(alternateshell) /bootlog /noguiboot /sos
Enable Boot Logging	/bootlog
Enable VGA Mode	/basevideo
Last Known Good Configuration	This option boots Windows XP using the last hardware configuration that produced a successful boot. Choose this option if you suspect the problem is hardware-related, but you can’t figure out the driver that’s causing the problem, or if you don’t have time to try out the other more detailed inspections. See Chapter , “Troubleshooting and Recovering from Problems,” for more information on this option.
Directory Services Restore Mode	/safeboot:dsrepair
Debugging Mode	/debug
Reboot	This option reboots the computer.
Return To OS Choices Menu	This option displays the OS Choices menu.

Insider_Secret For those Advanced Options that have equivalent Boot.ini switches, you can use those switches to place individual Advanced Options choices on the OS Choices menu. You do this by adding an item to Boot.ini’s [operating systems] section that starts Windows XP with the appropriate switches. For example, to add an option to the OS Choices menu to start Windows XP in safe mode, you’d add the following to Boot.ini’s [operating systems] section: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Safe Mode" /safeboot:minimal /bootlog /noguiboot /sos