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Can't exit diagnostic startup? HELP!

Tackle

Uh oh...

Was having problems with a win 7 laptop and I went and selected "Diagnostic Startup" in msconfig and then rebooted. Apparently this was a baaaaad idea. After re-selecting normal startup and rebooting nothing goes back to normal. Still in the classic theme, no restore points, can't access the network, event viewer cannot start, when I go into the services all of the options are greyed out (start, stop, automatic, manual) and a everything else that happens when you select "Diagnostic Startup".

In msconfig the services tab is nearly empty now, when it had 20+ services before, same as the startup tab. They are all selected now that it is in "normal startup", and I'm still missing a ton of them but nothing went back to the way it was before diagnostic startup.

This is not a spyware/malware problem. It is a demo laptop that is not allowed to access the internet and the only thing that is done on it is presentations.

Any ideas how to bring everything back?

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Comments

CodeBlox

Have you tried to boot from a "last known good configuration"?

F8 at boot and there it is.

Tackle

Yes I have, but it was done after a couple reboots and it doesn't see a problem with the diagnostic startup so it just brings me back to that.

Krunchi

Try a cold boot first leave the computer off for about a minute then see if that frees itup if not Give this one a try it should go out and repair any system files like your Msconfig and fix them. sfc /scannow

Tackle

Update: All the services are set as disabled except a select few. I can manually change them to automatic, but seems like a pain and I'm not sure which ones need to get changed and which ones do not.

Krunchi - I don't see any reason why it would be corrupt. This is a fairly fresh install...maybe only a month?

Krunchi

It could be a few hours old and you still could end up with a corrupt configuration sfc \scannow just repairs anything it finds wrong with the system files it won't hurt to run it. Up to you just giving you some options and ideas.

Tackle

Krunchi wrote: »

It could be a few hours old and you still could end up with a corrupt configuration sfc \scannow just repairs anything it finds wrong with the system files it won't hurt to run it. Up to you just giving you some options and ideas.

Thats true.

I'm pretty sure everything is back to normal now:

I had another laptop with the same configuration so I set all the services the same on the laptop that I thought was stuck in diagnostic startup. Apparently it wasn't "stuck" it just didn't turn the services back to what they were originally. Went through ALL of them and put them back to the same startup as the other laptop. Not fun, but all is well now! Whew.

Wonder why they didn't go back like they should have after going from diagnostic to normal startup and stayed disabled?