Windows 2000 Will Only Boot Into Safe Mode

[Patrick Satta]

Hello, I have a very old Windows 2000 computer. I haven't used it in years, but would like to start using it again because I have PhotoShop on it. The first problem I had is that it would show a bluescreen kernal mode trap whenever I tried to boot it up. A friend of mine who knows more about hardware than I do unseated & reseated the memory & that made it stop showing the bluescreen. I couldn't remember the password, so I found a boot utility online that I used to remove the password. Even before I removed the password, I could only get to the login screen by choosing Safe Mode. It would display the black loading Windows screen, then the Win2000 logo loading splash, then go black; or just freeze on the splash screen.
I now have access to the PC, but only via Safe Mode. Everything works fine, I can access the internet & download files, the disc & memory checks show nothing wrong. I am now attempting to find a compatible anti-virus, so I can see if an infection is the problem.

Any ideas as to what could be causing this problem?

 

[bazz2004]

The computer and OS are so dated that I'd forget this and replace your PC. Microsoft no longer support XP and that's much more recent than Windows 2000. These days there's free photo editing software of a quality that it is probably the equal of early versions of Photoshop.

 

[Cobalt006]

Bazz2004. Is right. From the sounds of things your hard drive maybe going out.Or you OS is corrupt. Being the computer is dated. You maybe better off getting another computer. But this is your choice.

 

[Patrick Satta]

Well, I got to thinking. I just couldn't understand why it would boot into Safe Mode, but not standard mode. So, I got to poking around a little bit more & discovered it would boot into VGA mode as well. The hard drive going bad just didn't make sense to me because when I ran it in VGA mode, all applications that could run in that resolution ran. So, I had an inspiration that maybe the display driver for the Nvidia Riva TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro could be bad. I ran the updater & it found a new driver, installed it, & now it boots up normally! Now I can get to work in my Adobe PhotoShop CS 8.0!

 

[Cobalt006]

Glad to hear, Good Luck. Hope all goes well. As far as a anti virus program. Good luck.

 

[bazz2004]

If there is a collection of irreplaceable photos on the computer make sure that you get them saved elsewhere. Maybe you could burn them to CD or save them on a usb memory stick. The latter are pretty cheap.. My first CD burner cost a fortune and was state of the art at the time.

Glad to see you got things running so easily. I was going to suggest that you removed the hard drive and put it in an enclosure so that you could access the data from a more modern machine using a usb connection. I think usb 1 was mainstream by the time Windows 2000 launched. Current machines have usb 3 hopefully backwards compatible.

You are probably very attached to your old computer but it is a liability. We don't know whether or not you kept up to date with computing since you last used the computer but things have moved on to the advantage of customers. Machines are incredibly fast and cheap compared to the early days. My first desktop cost over £1500 with Windows 98 but was left at a recycling centre years ago minus the hard drive.