technology How many times have you booted into "Safe Mode"?

[Splashee 28,581]

How many times have you booted into "Safe Mode" in your life, approximately?

 

And for what purpose? To repair something unknown? To disable a driver that didn't work? To resolve a driver conflict? To fix a sound driver issue? Just because you turned off the computer wrongly and it defaulted to boot into Safe Mode? You live in Safe Mode? You pressed a button by mistake when the computer was booting?

 

Did Safe Mode ever help you?

 

Have you ever encountered a blue screen in Safe Mode?

 

Do you know what Safe Mode is? (What is actually does?)

[Jon C 229]

Mostly remember using it back in the XP days when I'd screwed my graphics driver and needed to uninstall it.

[Pentium100 2,253]

Many times over many years, sometimes to remove a video card driver, sometimes to remove a driver that is acting up or even preventing normal boot etc, I can't remember all the times. And yes, I managed to solve some problems in safe mode and make the PC work correctly.

I do not like reinstalling Windows, so, in the past, if there was some kind of problem that prevented my PC from working correctly, I would try to fix it first (and was usually successful).

[Splashee 28,581]

I can tell that I have never gotten a single blue screen in Safe Mode, and I have been in Safe Mode too many times to count.

 

The most difficult drivers to deal with are USB drivers, which you have to install for every USB port. They kinda start conflicting, and there is no way to delete them, or keep track of them (detect them). Otherwise, sound drivers and sound cards have been an issue that must be resolved in Safe Mode.

 

Windows Millennium Edition was and is the most complex system to understand when it comes to Safe Mode, as Microsoft tried to remove DOS, and doing that takes away the manual way of getting into Safe Mode. There are too many bugs the deal with, and Millennium Edition added a new driver model, and Registry system that kinda started to lead into booting into Safe Mode all the time if messed with. It was horror!

[EpicEnergy 23,239]

I don't even know what safe mode is, so I probably haven't used it before either.

[Splashee 28,581]

8 minutes ago, EpicEnergy said:

I don't even know what safe mode is, so I probably haven't used it before either.

Press F5 or F8 when you boot your computer. It will boot into Safe Mode, which loads Windows with only the safe drivers, like very basic stuff. Very annoying and slow. But it allows you to remove drivers that breaks your computer, etc

[Stone Cold Steve Jobs 22,471]

I have done it several times. When I bootEd in safe mode it was to ensure a virus scan would be more efficient. It worked very well with Malwarebytes.

[Splashee 28,581]

1 minute ago, Stone Cold Steve Tuna said:

I have done it several times. When I bootEd in safe mode it was to ensure a virus scan would be more efficient. It worked very well with Malwarebytes.

I don't know how much restrain applications get in Safe Mode. it might be better to run virus scan in normal mode. Unless you are completely locked out.

During the XP Blaser and Sasser virus days, I used a hack to get into the System account, so I could terminate the smss process, then start my virus scan, and immediately terminate Winlogon so Blaster couldn't stop me. It was a mess! Thank got Service Pack 2 stopped Blaster and Sasser from entering through Windows Update (so bad!)

[Stone Cold Steve Jobs 22,471]

I was told that safe mode can help find viruses easier, because it doesn’t boot up every script. That is, it can help find viruses not made with safe mode in mind. As I understand when you boot normally some viruses can detect when they’re about to be scanned and they can hide until the scan ends. But in safe mode some Don’t get the chance to boot all the way and you have a better chance of catching them that way.

 I am not too tech savvy so I could be way off the mark. This is coming from a computer repair guy we used to use all the time. He unhacked my first computer.

[Splashee 28,581]

There are only a couple of ways that viruses can execute during the startup of Windows.

Then we have all the flaws, where viruses gets launched from web browsers, and from autorun of USB sticks.

 

 

But the worst kind of viruses are the ones who manages to get into the drivers. It is basically game over if they do that. I don't know a way to do that myself. We are talking rootkits and stuff. The worst kind.
But when that happens, even Safe Mode won't help you. Safe Mode runs trusted drivers, but by then, the viruses just hide until you run Normally again, and they change names and locations and make Windows not see them. It's a mess.

I trust Malwarebytes to find the viruses on my computer, but running it directly in Normal mode without any restarts. Just let the antivirus program deal with any threat without trying to aid. That's the best way.

 

Safe Mode helps you to find why your computer is crashing randomly. But it is very difficult to find out why. You just know it is rare the computer crashes in Safe Mode.

[Stone Cold Steve Jobs 22,471]

Root kits are a total pain in the ass. Is there any way in particular to remove them?

[MangoFoalix 25,046]

That is uh... an interesting question to ask.

I have no idea, I only use it when I really need it. Most of the time if there are problems booting I can usually do something without booting into safe mode.

46 minutes ago, Stone Cold Steve Tuna said:

Root kits are a total pain in the ass. Is there any way in particular to remove them?

Only special software if you are lucky.

Rootkits can kill system components if you are that unlucky.

[SparklingSwirls 21,372]

I have a couple times when Steam has stopped working on my laptop (sometimes it can't open because it says it's still running in the background). Deleting the files in safe mode and then reinstalling has worked each time so far...

Edited February 14, 2020 by SparklingSwirls

[Cash In 22,722]

I have used it a couple of times to fix up a couple of drivers. Luckily, I haven't found the need to boot it up often, as I don't usually have many issues with my computer.

[Pentium100 2,253]

4 hours ago, Splashee said:

Safe Mode runs trusted drivers, but by then, the viruses just hide until you run Normally again, and they change names and locations and make Windows not see them. It's a mess.

And that's when it is better to connect the hard drive from the infected computer to a clean PC and run the virus scan there. Nothing from the infected PC is started, so it cannot affect the scan. And since AV works by looking at signatures etc, it can find rootkits, as long as they are not running at the time.

[Twiggy 2,966]

Numerous times. I used to love to tinker with my computer and it would often result in problems. Usually I was able to fix in in safe mode, but a few times I had to completely reinstall the OS.

That was until I figured out the shortcut of just deleting that pesky system32 bloatware that Microsoft insists on putting in their OS.

[cuteycindyhoney 13,322]

My first computer (1998!) had a weird habit of losing contact with the sound card. I had to do the Safe Mode shuffle a lot of times before I finally just replaced the sound card completely. Then it settled down. 

[Flow 1,629]

I've booted into it once on my current laptop just to disable a particular program. If I can remember, it had to do with improving framerates with certain games, not too sure about it because it's been so long.

[Nightfall Gloam 18,272]

Used to do it almost all the time with my older computers as I was young and stupid and would often end up breaking it, only to break them more.

These days, not so much, especially more careful now since Windows 10 makes it more difficult than it needs to be to enter safe mode when needed.

[碇 シンジン 27,437]

With the windows auto repair/start-up repair it's basically not as needed anymore because if the start-up repair fails you cannot get into the safe mode often either. Had that happen couple weeks ago when my HDD got corrupted and refused to mount so no safe mode either had to check it out with Linux.  

Edited February 14, 2020 by 碇 シンジン

[Splashee 28,581]

10 hours ago, Pentium100 said:

And that's when it is better to connect the hard drive from the infected computer to a clean PC and run the virus scan there. Nothing from the infected PC is started, so it cannot affect the scan. And since AV works by looking at signatures etc, it can find rootkits, as long as they are not running at the time.

Well, when I am on questionable Internet sites to download something, I just run it in a sandbox (VMWare with Windows 7) so all the viruses gets installed in the fake environment.

My Windows 7 sandbox is still behaving after all these years, so I wonder if any bad viruses made it, or not The index pages on the web browsers are completely taken over though!

[NotATimeTraveller 6]

I think I've used it like twice, don't recall why. I think it just gave the option and I thought, "Hey, safe mode. Cool." Something like that.

[The Kaeya Simp 13,990]

I haven't done it on my computer,
but I had to do it on a sort of cousin's slow netbook (his dad gave him a netbook, designed for Windows 7 Starter, with full Windows 10 on it, this didn't help, nor did the copious amount of malware on it) but it still didn't help (because it was Windows 10... on a 2009 netbook)

[Here No Longer 5,281]

I'm not sure, though I could probably count it on my two hands. Pretty much only to fix a problem on older computers running 95/XP.

Edited February 14, 2020 by Angel_Dust

[TheSupremeLeaderOfChaos 1,211]

Hmmm several times, I think? Usually to do stuff like confirm the type of hard drive I've got, or the model of my computer. I've never tried doing anything too hardcore in safe mode.