Help! I Screwed Up And Switched Off VGA

T

TyJammer

New Member
Yikes. I did an automatic update on my machine with XP Pro. When it rebooted, the graphics had reverted to the ugly 4-bit 16 color onboard VGA. For whatever reason, in a pang of pure stupidity, I disabled it.

Now when I boot up it shows the windows logo, and the welcoming sound chimes in, but the desktop is mearly black. Is there a way around this?

So far I've tried booting up in "safe mode", but that just rallys off a bunch of comand promps, and freezes for hours. It seems as though I can reboot my system from the emachines system restore dosk that came with my desktop, but that would mean losing incredibly valuable accounting data.

As a last resort, does anyone know of an easy was to get the files off my desktop while it's in this mode of black but fully functional? Unfortunately I didn't have it networked beforehand (live and learn) so I can't pull the files off that way.

Any help is trmendously appreciated. Thanks.
 
whatever u do dont touch your emachine restore disk.

try loading last known good configuration, also do u have an xp pro disk?
 
The last known good configuration unfortunately only takes me back to the dark desktop when it starts up. I do still have my XP Pro disk. I started it up with that, but aborted when it seemed like it was going to wipe my system clean. Is there some way I can reinstall using the XP Pro disk without damaging all my content? It would be great if I could get the system back online without having to reinstall all my programs, but it comes to that I'd rather get on it than wait any longer.

Muchos Gracias
 
erm., choose the repair option i think. or you can try getting another hard drive and installing it on that. or you could install a second copy of xp on the same hard drive. or you could use a live linux boot cd and copy important files to a flash drive.
 
just overlay your OS. Boot off your windows XP disk, go into setup and install windows xp again. BUT when it asks you if you want to format, say leave it as it is. Remember what your user name is. Once Xp is installed go into safe mode and copy all the data from your old profile into your new profile.
 
if you have enough hard drive space it is less risky to install another copy of the os on the same partition. there is less chance of it going wrong and ruining the original install. i quad-boot xp-sp1, xp-s2, xp-64-1218, xp-64-rc1 myself. :)
 
Thanks guys, that worked. I had an old copy of Home edition, so I just installed that along side the old Pro version. Then I copied the files over from my old desktop, and now I'm back in business.

Rock out jammers.
 
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