Technologies are described herein for allowing a computer system to recover from an invalid configuration, without requiring any modifications to the hardware of the computer system by the user. The computer determines whether a boot-fail counter exceeds a threshold value. If the boot-fail counter exceeds the threshold value, the computer executes an exception processing routine. In one aspect, the exception processing routine causes the computer to reset configuration settings stored in a memory area of the computer to default configuration settings. If the boot-fail counter does not exceed the threshold value, the computer increments the boot-fail counter and executes system initialization routines for booting the computer. Upon successfully completing the system initialization routines, the computer resets the boot-fail counter.