Solved No Safe Mode boot

I have an older system that refuses to boot into Safe Mode. This system used to be my daily driver that I built from scratch in 2019. Initially Win10 but later let it upgrade to Win11. Yesterday I was going to pull the video card out to use in another system so was attempting to run DDU, in Safe Mode, prior to removing and replacing the GPU. Nothing I tried seemed to work. Bios Debug LED showed Code 36 which seems to be "CPU PEI initialization." Even ran DISM followed by SFC all the system would do is boot to a blank screen. I was getting a POST beep. Lastly I tried to get it to boot to Safe Mode by using System Configuration utility in Admin mode and setting it to boot to Safe Mode. Ugggg....now it always boots to the same blank screen whereas prior it would boot to the OS normally.

So my question is there a way to modify the System Configuration settings via another method(PE boot, etc) to get the system to boot normally and not attempt Safe Mode with each boot? Of course that still leaves the Safe Mode issue.

In the end I just went ahead and pulled the GPU out and replaced it with another GPU and figured I'd get to it later. This is not a critical system and I can just as easily Nuke the current OS install and reload Win11 clean. So repairing the issue is more or less a curious learning thought.

Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming Wifi 7
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
32 GB ram
1 tb NVMe boot drive, 1 tb secondary NVMe drive, 4 gb HDD.
Pulled a Gigabyte RX 5700 XT GPU and replaced it with an Nvidia RTX 2060.

BamaInArk said:

I have an older system that refuses to boot into Safe Mode.

Click to expand...

The simplest fix would probably be an In-Place Upgrade, or... as you mentioned, a clean install.

Well turns out the no Safe Mode boot was more than likely a hardware issue. I pulled the boot drive and installed another one to do a clean install. The clean install went fine until it rebooted the first time. Booted to the same blank screen. So I had to fiddle with the bios. This system uses a switch to switch between 2 bioses. I reverted to an older bios then updated that one and so far it's working. Still trying to determine exactly what the issue might have been.