Your Windows startup process is crashing with a Windows Stop error before you can get a login screen. You suspect that a service is crashing the system, but you obviously can’t use your normal login process to disable the service. What is the next best option for ensuring the service is disabled?
A) Reinstall Windows from the original installation media
B) Boot into Safe Mode
C) Use the Windows Recovery Console to disable the service from the command line
D) Select the Last Known Good Configuration boot option
The answer: C) Use the Windows Recovery Console to disable the service from the command line
The Windows Recovery Console provides a powerful set of tools that can manipulate almost any aspect of the operating system environment.
The incorrect answers:
A) Reinstall Windows from the original installation media
A complete reinstallation of Windows is pretty drastic, considering that you just need to have a single service disabled.
B) Boot into Safe Mode
While it’s true that Safe Mode only loads a fraction of the normal startup files and drivers, there’s no guarantee that our problematic service won’t be started. Safe Mode will not ensure with 100% that the service will be disabled.
D) Select the Last Known Good Configuration boot option
In this example, our problem doesn’t appear to be based on any changes or modifications. Changing the system to use the last known good configuration is an unknown variable and it isn’t clear that it would help our situation.
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Want to know more? Watch “Recovering the Operating System.”When things go bad with an operating system, they can often go very, very bad. In this video, we’ll show you how you can recover from major operating system startup problems using Safe Mode, Last Known Good Configuration, Automated System Recovery Disks, and the Windows Recovery Console. |