Solved - Custom bootable skins Crash!

[Ummon]

Going from this thread, I decided to make my own boot skin in Paint that was just a black screen. After editing the startup options and restarting, my drive won't boot. It just doesn't do anything after the card and motherboard bios screens. Does anyone have any idea what I can do to fix this? Thanks.

[Kangum]

go into safe mode and undo it.

(press F8 key during boot)

[Ummon]

When I press F8 it doesn't go into safe mode but instead gives me this little blue dos-like menu with the list of drives available. If I select the hard drive it goes back into its stall mode. Blank screen at 640x480. Hmmm. The image was 640x480. Maybe it's stuck on that image. No idea how to get to it, though.

[clickhea]

thats because your in the bios

[protokatie]

Depending on what version of Windows you are using and what vendor your BIOS is, it isnt always F8 that brings up the menu. Try holding down CTRL or even F10. Check with your compies docs to see what button brings up the proper menu. (On my computer, I believe it is F2 of all things...)

[Kangum]

i actually googled before i posted that because i thought it was F5 and it microsoft support site stated for windows xp its F8. thats why my post had the edit because i googled it first. so much for microsoft support.

like protokatie said apparently you will have to look it up wich F key it is for your particular machine.

[protokatie]

If your computer has a single operating system installed, press and hold the F8 key as your computer restarts. You need to press F8 before the Windows logo appears. If the Windows logo appears, you will need to try again by waiting until the Windows logon prompt appears, and then shutting down and restarting your computer.

This is a quote from Vista help. But still may not work for XP or Vista people. It WOULD be nice if they made this a universal thing, as opposed to it being different for almost all models/OS's...

EDIT: Addition! DL Knoppix onto a CD or DVD and boot with that, then delete the file you mangled. (Dont know why I didnt think to add this before.) Knoppix,, in case you didnt know is a freely available Linux/Xwin distro based on Debian, that can load without being installed. Do not try to save files to an NTFS disc tho, as the NTFS drivers for KNOPPIX could corrupt data. You can still delete the bad .BMP file tho. And thus restore things to their origonal state.

[Ummon]

Okay. I got it. A friend told me to use my XP disc to do a repair. There were some errors but that didn't fix it. Then I  thought, 'wait, I'm at the command line....perhaps if I just delete the boot.bmp, it'll be fine.' And it was. Boots up now. Thank you for the support.

[FhM]

I have had more luck doing this kind of thing with a  program called bootskin. It gives you exact instructions of how to fix it if it goes wrong as well.

[TheShanMan]

Yeah, bootskin is great. I have a centipede cab that's in great shape, so rather than giving it a mame theme, I wanted to stick with a centipede theme. I used the centipede arcade flyer for the BIOS screen, the windows boot screen, and the windows wallpaper. Plus some centipede wav's for startup and shutdown. Bootskin was easy to use, and making a bootskin file is easy too. It's just a zip file with a .bootskin extension.

[Ummon]

Thanks. I forgot I have that laying around.