Computer Freezes

Let’s set the scene. The goal of this post is to put you into the shoes of a computer tech when he encounters a computer that won’t boot into safe mode.

So you arrive at work and you sit down at your computer with a nice hot cup of brew in hand. Things have been going well for you lately and you are feeling like this is going to be another really productive day for you. You fire up your computer and start with your normal routine of checking your email and maybe some news on the internet. Then it happens. Your computer freezes up on you and you have no choice but to just hold in the power button on your computer and power it off. You go ahead and power on your machine again and see if it will boot up before you go calling your computer department. The results are not what you expect. During boot, your computer freezes up and just reboots. Ok, time to call your ‘computer guy’.

For the sake of conversation, let’s call the ‘computer guy’ John.

John arrives at your desk and may start by asking a few questions such as:

• When did this start happening?
• What programs were you using, or what specifically were you doing when your computer locked up?

After recreating the problem of the computer not booting correctly, John figures that the issue has to be one of these 4 things:

• There could be a possible virus or spyware problem that you did not even notice
• There could be a corrupt driver for a hardware component
• The hard disk may be going bad
• There could be corrupt system files not allowing the computer to boot

John then proceeds to boot the computer into safe mode. You can boot into safe mode by following these steps:

• Make sure you computer is powered off
• Turn your computer on and start hitting the F8 key
• An Advanced Boot Menu will come up with an option to boot into safe mode

As the computer is booting into safe mode, there are a list of files that will scroll on the screen. However, John notices that the boot process is stuck on one of these files and the computer has stalled. A lot of times safe mode can get hung on files such as mup.sys and agp440.sys.

Well, this is not good. If the computer won’t boot into safe mode, then John will need to take another direction in order to try and fix the computer. At this point, John decides to run a test on the hard drive to make sure that it is not bad. Most new computers have these diagnostic tools built into them. They can be accessed via the BIOS or from the Advanced Boot Menu. The test results for the hard drive come back as ‘passed’. So at this point, we know that the hard drive is good.

The next step John will take is to run a repair on the Operating System as the problem is most likely due to a corrupt system file. This process can take about 30 to 40 minutes, but the success rate is pretty good.

After running the repair, John boots the computer into safe mode and YEAH, it worked!

Now comes the big test. Will the computer start in regular mode? Heck yes. He reboots and the computer safely boots into regular mode. At this point, John should run a full virus scan and also run a program such as Malwarebytes to make sure there is no trace of spyware or malware.

I hope this scenario will help you if your computer won’t boot into safe mode. Let me also state that these steps are not always the fix, but are the most logical steps to fixing this problem.

Feel free to post a question via a comment and I will do my best to help you out!

Cheers.