How do I boot to Safe Mode in Parallels?

Thread was moved from "General Discussions > User Solutions and Workarounds" to "Parallels Desktop for Mac > Windows Guest OS Discussion".
Stacey M

Hi,

I am using Parallels 2 Build 3214 and I think my Windows XP Pro VM has contracted a piece of malware that is causing Windows to keep returning to the Welcome screen when I try and login.

I have seen this before with my old PC - Spybot sorts it out but I have to get into Safe Mode - the trouble is tapping F5 on the Mac keyboard as the Virtual PC starts to load at the BIOS screen simply activates the speaker control on my MacBook.

Is there any way to get Windows into Safe Mode?

 

I found out how to do this - F8 works as well. However when I log into Safe Mode with command prompt it goes to normal safe mode and keeps looping to the Welcome screen. Anybody any idea how to force the command prompt?

 

hi,
sorry not quite understood what did you mean under command prompt? You need to get interactive mode where you'll can selcting which drivers to load or what?

 

No - by command prompt I mean the black screen with the white text on that you can get to if you don't want to boot into the Windows GUI. Just at this stage I am wanting to get access to the virtual C drive to back up some crucial data.

 

Sorry but i firstly listening about such feature at Windows. Win kernel and GUI are unseparatable parts. Just one possible thing (that known to me) mostly matching to single user mode at Unix based systems is a Microsoft Recovery console but it has rather limited functionality and it's not an OS Windows of course.

 

This works:

when in normal operation of Windows, go Start->Run and type "msconfig". This will open the System Config app. On the 'Boot.INI" panel, you can select all the various Safe Mode options you need, and then restart Windows.

 

Jon,
thank you for your post. I din't know about those windows features before.
I tried your suggestion and configured safe mode with alternative shell. But it looks like self deception because graphic mode still loading and GUI login window presents. Single difference is that after logon you coming into cmd.exe instead of standard Windows explorer. But if you type something matching to "start ." you'll be surprized with loading native Windows environment (explorer and etc.)