Hello foxyxat...
have you checked your System Properties to see if System Restore is enabled?
Anyway, it seems you can't even trigger the menu selection at startup, not that you can't just enter
safemode...
I don't know if a rootkit could be related with that, as flavius said, but in worst case you can't even get a startup menu, why don't we just force it to appear?
You could try this:
(It's a silly solution, but you will get your menu)
Download and install
EasyBCD (Scroll to the bottom of the linked page for download link)
Run EasyBCD, and where it says "Add/Remove Entries", go to the field "Add entry" and select e.g. Mac, Type=Generic X86 PC and press "add entry", then press the save button on top. Exit EasyBCD.
Restart your computer. You will get a menu to select which operating system to start, You will get 2 options:
1.Windows Vista 2.NTS Mac OS X
Select Windows vista with the arrow keys (besides, nts mac os x does not work, we just put it there to force the menu to appear, you can remove this entry from EasyBCD later), and then press F8. This will bring you the safemode selections menu. Select safe mode and press Enter. You will get into safemode where you can try your thing.
As for not being able to press
F8 at startup , this might be happening for the following reason:
- You are using a usb keyboard, and your BIOS is not set to support Legacy USB and/or USB Keyboard, letting you unable to use your keyboard until you enter Windows. You will have to enter bios (Press F1/F2/F10/DEL key at startup, depending on the manufacturer ) and change this setting under USB menu.
If this is the case, my suggestion for forcing menus manually won't work either cause you won't have a keyboard there too. You will need to enter bios to enable USB KEYBOARD support or use a PS/2 keyboard.