Windows 98 only boots in safe mode...

[AvgJoe]

Windows 98 only boots in safe mode. Yes it says safe mode in all four corners. It goes to the command prompt before loading the desktop and ask me the options and when i choose number one for normal, it just restarts and i can only get to the desktop by safe mode. I want to get some old pictures off the computer, so i can have them on my new computer with win xp. The thing is, when in safe mode you can't use your cd-rom so the pictures can't be burned to a cd. Also, it doesn't detect my floppy a drive, so i can't just put the pics on a floppy. If I can get it to detect the floppy then I can just put the pics on there, or if I can just get it to run in normal mode then I can burn the pictures to a cd. I appreciate any help I can get. I'm sure this issue has been solved many times before, can anyone give me some help?
-Joe

 

[gbhall]

quickest to take your HDD out

You may get your PC to boot properly, but a very much quicker solution is to temporarily remove your old HDD and put it into your new XP machine on a secondary connection.

If you have two cables, one going to CD/DVD, put the old drive in place of the CD/DVD. If you have only one cable, you first will need to set the selection jumper on your old HDD to 'slave' before putting it in place of the CD/DVD

Once you have the drive in and recognised, it appears in XP as a drive D:,E: etc depending on what it replaced. You can just drag and drop your stuff then.

 

[gooderguy]

If you still want to try to boot your 98 machine to normal mode, try some of the following.

In safe mode you can disable many startup applications by clicking on “Start” then “Run” and type “msconfig”, click “Ok”. Click the “Startup” tab, you can uncheck all items for now, click “Ok” then click “Restart”.

If that doesn't work, try booting to COMMAND PROMPT and type SCANREG /RESTORE, this will allow you to restore an earlier windows registry.

Depending on what the problem is, this may work so you can burn your pictures.

I cannot stress enough, always backup your stuff. One of my customers was crying the other day cause her hard drive totaly crashed and she lost a crap load of pictures.

I often just email myself stuff to my Gmail account, it's got 2.5GB space. If you want an invite for Gmail, let me know.

Good luck.