Windows 7 forum: Safe Mode

Bob,
I went to the tutorial, and it mentioned a Ubunta Live CD but I couldn't find it, so I made a DVD(CD too small), put it in the drive and it loaded but the icons look nothing like the tutorial. There is a vertical line of icons on the left of the screen and when I click on one, a white box appears with nothing in at. So, obviously I can't access the windows files to make changes. I still think that when I clicked on the safe mode box in sys config, that locked the system, preventing Ubunta from fully loading. Like I said before, the win 7 install disk won't load. I've spent many hours on the internet trying to find a solution, but nothin yet. Again, any recommendations or solutions would be appreciated.

You can boot from a Windows 7 repair disc and get into the Command Prompt to save your data. You could also boot with Ubuntu or a disc to restore your computer to factory settings. Of course if you have a system backup, you could boot from the recovery disc you have for your backup/restore software.

When you've gotten your system back like you want it, I urge you to get yourself an external hard drive and a good 3rd party backup program. You can set it up to do everything automagically at the time and frequency of your choice. 1 TB external hard drives are about $70 these days and a really good FREE backup program is the Easeus todo backup free which you can download from
http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm . That can save you a lot of time and frustration the next time something like this happens. Sooner or later it happens to all computers for one reason or another.

Good luck.

a Ubuntu disc, or a UBCD disc. You can make a Windows 7 repair disc on any Windows 7 computer, you can download a Ubuntu ISO image from http://www.ubuntu.com/download, and you can download the files to create a UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) from download.com . All 3 of these options will give you a CD you can use to boot to either the command prompt or a Windows like desktop (UBCD or Ubuntu). That will allow you to access your files on your computer.

Good luck.

Thanks to all that offered assistance, but nothing has worked. So, my question now is: if I replace the hard drive, will windows be able to recognize the hard drive to format it and reload my programs? Also, it seems that the more I try solutions, the more harm I do. I am at the point where at start up, the computer indicates 3 green lights(123) (another failure has occurred) and 2 beeps-nothing more after that. Thanks

You boot the restore or OS CD and let it install to the new blank drive. If you partition and format in advance you can trip up the OS install or restore.
Bob