System Restore was introduced by Microsoft particularly for the sort of instances where, if you load a corrupt or dodgy driver for instance, and something fails to work because of that driver’s installation, you can restore a significant number of settings in your operating system to an earlier point in time; provided that you have created a previous Restore Point, and your computer works properly again without your having to do much but wait for the process to complete.

There are times, though, when that new driver can prevent Windows XP from booting fully (Even in Safe Mode.) and cause it to go down with a BSOD during boot-up, ad-infinitum.

Although there are alternative methods for getting Windows XP to start up and ignore the newly-installed driver that is causing the problem; (Most if not all of them are mentioned in this blog in other articles.) you may wish that you could use System Restore to resolve the error. – Nevertheless it appears that you can’t; because XP won’t boot, and unless it does you can’t get to System Restore… Or so you thought up until now.

This is how to launch System Restore from a command-prompt: –

First shut down your computer and/or switch it off. – This will clear any residual crap from the RAM; just to be on the safe side of cautious. Also we need to get to the Windows Advanced Options Menu; so shutting down and switching off will help there too.

OK; everything’s off: Press your computer’s power button to switch it on, and as soon as you do that repeatedly press the F8 key. One of two things should happen after the initial BIOS screen appears, depending upon the motherboard you have fitted inside your box: – (If anyone tries this and gets something else happening then I’d ask you to comment below. Please give details of the motherboard you have fitted, as well as other system spec.s (Including age of system.), and as good a description as you can of what happens.)

Either it’ll open up a boot-menu screen, or it’ll bypass this step and go straight to the next step. If it does open a boot-menu screen, (Primary Hard drive, CD-ROM, Floppy, etc.) we don’t need that, so don’t change anything there, just hit the Esc key, and as soon as you press the Esc key, repeatedly hit F8 again.

The Windows Advanced Options Menu that I mentioned earlier should appear. This is white text on a dark-grey background. The options open to you are: –

Select the “Safe Mode With Command Prompt” option.

On the next screen you’ll see “Please select the operating system to start.”

If you’ve only installed a single installation of Windows XP then your choice will already be highlighted and you just press Enter¬ again. If your machine has on a dual-boot and/or you see more than a single operating system; use the up and down arrow keys to select the operating system that you were just trying to boot into, (Windows XP.) and then press Enter¬.

Log on to your computer using an administrator account or with an account that has administrator privileges.
At the command-prompt, type the following command, exactly as shown below: -

C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

When you see the System Restore window, the graphics may not look quite the same as you’re used to, but you can still follow the instructions on the screen and restore your computer to an earlier state’ provided that you have at least one previously-made restore-point.

- Target neutralised.

What if your computer refuses to boot into Safe Mode With Command Prompt? If it does then see this series of posts: “Something To Try If Windows XP Crashes During Boot”.