/ How to Exit Safe Mode

How to Exit Safe Mode

My monitor is black, but if I push the monitor button it says it is in Safe Mode and then goes black again. How do I get it out of safe mode? Kat Delong

Are you sure it’s in Safe Mode? If it is truly in Safe Mode, you will see the words Safe Mode in each corner of the display. If you don’t see that, it is possible that you have an issue with your monitor settings and not Safe Mode. Have you tried a forced shutdown? Hold down the power button until the machine turns off. You will get a message that Windows was improperly shut down. You will see an option to load the last known good configuration. Click on it and let it run. Hopefully, when it loads, it will be in normal mode. If that doesn’t work, try the solutions below.

Check Your Display Settings

Can you right click on the desktop and get into Properties? If you can, get into Settings and check your colors - if they are set to 16, reset them to 256 and see if that improves the monitor issue. Also in Settings, check the Screen Area Slider and change it to a higher setting if necessary.

Corrupted Video Card Drivers

It’s possible that your video card drivers are corrupted, so it is running with the generic Safe Mode drivers so that you can fix it. Get into Properties again and then into Device Manager. Look at the display adapters - select them and choose Remove them one at a time. Restart the computer and let it detect the video card and load the devices again.

Check the Safe Boot

Your machine may well be in Safe Mode and the computer is instructing it to boot directly into Safe Mode rather than in Normal Mode. If you can get to run or a command line, type in: msconfig. Go to the Boot tab - is there an option with a check mark called Safe Boot? If there is, uncheck it, shut the computer down and power up again and see if you get into Normal Mode.

If none of these solutions works for you, you may have to pull the data off of the hard drive and reinstall your operating system. Check out our Filetonic article on reinstalling your operating system for more detailed directions.