It is common to boot into safe mode when you’re experiencing problems with Windows XP and want to troubleshoot. However I didn’t liked the whole procedure that one has to follow to boot into safe mode (like you must press [F8], and then you must select Safe Mode from yet another menu).

Wouldn’t it be nice if Booting into Safe Mode was available from the Boot menu? So, let’s add a little option of booting into safe mode in the Boot Menu itself.

Just follow the steps:

1. Open Boot.ini (Start->Run->”C:\boot.ini”)
2. Now under “[operating systems]“, locate the line that ends with the “/fastdetect”.
3. Now copy the whole line and paste it in a new line below.
4. Now in this new line, change the text which says WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” into WINDOWS=”Safe Mode”.
5. Remove any other text which follows after that and in the end add this “/safeboot:minimal /sos /bootlog” (without quotes). (see the example figure below)

   Click for larger view

6. Save and Reboot to test.

Note: If for some reason the menu is not shown at startup, read here as how to change the boot menu time since it might be zero.