[IamLakota]

I hope somebody here can help,when trying to get to safe mode when computer boots by pressing F8 all I get is a small window asking which device I want to boot from. If I hit drive C my hard drive it just goes to reboot and windows comes up normaly.No matter what I do I can't get the computer to boot into safe mode. Any help would be appreciated.

[eggs420]

You are hitting f8 too early then. You probably have a bios that uses F8 during boot to access the 'boot menu'. Right after that, before the full-screen XP logo shows, you can hit f8. If you want to FORCE safe-mode, click start, click run, and type "msconfig". Then go to Boot.ini at the top, and make sure your XP installation is highlighted (something like multi(0)disk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=AlwaysOff). Then just put a check mark in the box below for "/SAFEBOOT". Hit ok, reboot, and welcome to safe mode. Just run msconfig again in safe mode and disable that check mark to boot back to real windows.

Hitting f8 is all in the timing..The above way is a bit of a hack, but some bioses (and fast drives ) make it really hard to get into that menu. If you need to use it (too) often, you can get around that by making a second boot.ini operating system entry, and making use of the boot selection screen. It will give you (by default) 30 seconds to pick which OS and also gives you the option of hitting f8 for safe mode and etc during that period.

[Shinjikun]

Tap on F8 while the computer boots up right after post. You can select C as the boot drive (if it appears) and >IMMEDIATELY< afterwards resume tapping on F8 again.

[IamLakota]

Thanks for the replys,eggs420 you were right I was hitting the f8 key to soon or to late.Unfortunately I had to do a refomat and fresh install last evening but on the bright sideI did get some practice in and can now get into safe mode so thanks again.

[Shinjikun]

Mmmm, formatting...