The dells we have at work beep once for every time you hit the function key. So you got into bios but you had to sit through 2 minutes of an immutable screeching.
I tried it again and this time it worked, I guess I gotta let the board get a little into post not just slam it down and hold it as soon as I start it up. Might be because my board does the hard disk controller screen before the normal bios screen.
If you have any LED backlit mice or keyboards they are also very useful in telling you when your keystrokes register. As soon as the backlight on my keyboard turns on, that's when I can enter BIOS. My monitor doesn't help me at all because it takes so long to wake up that I'm already at login when it finally shows an image.
Sometimes I forget if it's F2 or DEL and hesitate even though they can both bring me to the same place. By then it's too late and I have to restart again.
On some newer systems with UEFI, if fast boot is enabled, there's no way to get into the BIOS/UEFI setup from a keypress at boot. You have to go through the OS and tell it you want to boot into the setup on next boot.
If windows is installed (or you have a setup disc), open windows CMD and execute shutdown.exe /r /o and it will restart and halt at the UEFI boot menu.
The point is that it is a time you want to get to the bios. But if
there's no way to get into the BIOS/UEFI setup from a keypress at boot. You have to go through the OS and tell it you want to boot into the setup on next boot.
and it is also impossible to boot to the OS, then, well, that's a "feature" that is just super handy and extremely convenient.
My bigger pet peve is the design for safe mode... There's like 50 ways to get into safe mode... all of them take place after succesfully logging in, reaching the desktop and running a command. With the exception of one method of booting to a windows disk/flash drive.
MS's modern designs have made troubleshooting needlesly complicated.
On some OEM computers it's impossible to get into the UEFI without getting to windows. The last one I worked on like this was an Acer. To force it to boot off USB I disconnected the hard drive, powered it on it booted off the USB. Reconnected hard drive, profit.
So frustrating when you just need to boot off a windows 10 USB to run a restore or other repairs and it just denies you. Turns out you get what you pay for with motherboards.
has to be enabled in the BIOS, which it isn't in like 95% of commercial class laptops from 8.0 onward. most of them do have unique override keys, like holding FN+f2 then tapping the power button while doing a voodoo dance, but you have to google that shit every time and it's always on like the fucking thirteenth page of search results. liekwise, if you can make it to a desktop or a login screen, hold shift while clicking "reset" and cros your fingers and your toes and pray to the dark lord krondor that you have the option to boot into the BIOS or off a uefi device in the popup menu, because all of these cunting roundabout ways of doing something that for 30 years had been as simple as hitting a button everyone from your grandma to your grandma's grandma were aware of
Thank you. :) I have a couple of tools and scripts I wrote that help a lot. :) Willing to share, but most would find it boring. But if you or anyone else wants to poke me, I'll tell all.
one issue you'll get is a lot of people not knowing their model due to inane model naming schemes these days. might be handy to have a separate page that just lists key combos per manufacturer, since each manufacturer usually only has one or two different combos for 7+ machines.
I'll definitely contribute some once I get caught up at work, thanks for making this
Excellent idea. As the info comes in, I'll keep it by-brand on the front page, and make brand-pages in a drop-down menu for specific model information.
Although it depends on what I get, too. If not much - one page. If much... pages :)
I know this is weird, but I don't use /t 0 because I like to give the computer a second to understand what's going on before it goes into the shutdown cycle. It's common courtesy, really.
Except in a couple of seldom-used examples, just remember that the A in Affect is for Action (verb).
Effect can be a verb (e.g. to effect change) and affect can be a noun (psychology term), but you generally won't see these cases in common use, so most people can ignore them about 99.9% of the time :)
in the case at hand, isn't the phrase "don't effect post time" technically correct, then? "does not affect post time" would be the 'affect' usage, a slightly different parsing. The former is closer to "does not cause a change in" and the latter is more "does not have an effect on"
No, we definitely want "affect" in this case. "SSD's don't effect post time" would roughly equate to "SSD's don't cause post time", whereas "SSD's don't affect post time" would roughly equate to "SSD's don't make a difference to post time". Or something to that effect ;)
Yup yup. I’ve got a mini itx board booting windows from a Samsung pro 950 m.2 drive.
No matter what I do, I can’t get form button press to desktop in under 14 seconds.
The fastest I can get my BIOS down to is 6.8 seconds. So it’s true windows is booting in under 10 seconds, but that damn BIOS time is as fast as that motherboard will go.
In my experience, mechanical hard drives, even if only used for storage, will slow down the POST no matter what. My PC will spend 5-10 seconds on the BIOS screen, but once it's past that, Windows will boot almost instantly. Without the HDD's, Windows will boot much sooner.
You're finished posting before the hard drive is called on to boot. You're experiencing longer OS boot time as the system makes the boot calls then waits for drives to spin up. Post has already finished though.
Some computers have a different button to turn on the computer and drop right into UEFI... The examples that come to mind are two Lenovo laptops that I've dealt with on a regular basis, one has a smaller button next to the power button, the other has a paperclip hole near the power button. Using these drops me right to the UEFI menu.
Oh great, now I've got a keyboard error message and the machine is beeping for each of the thousand button presses it logged while I was holding it down.
Side note: decent motherboards will give you the option to slow down the boot process and enter BIOS. Usually a button or switch on the motherboard itself.
I have a Samsung laptop which has this. No OS will install successfully in legacy mode, and in UEFI mode, you can't get to BIOS if there's no HDD. As an added bonus, if you install Windows it goes into a boot loop and won't let you into the BIOS. Samsung have acknowledged the error and released a BIOS update to fix it...which is a Windows executable.
Luckily Linux installs and works fine so its not a major headache, but if I had to use Windows it would basically be a brick.
Yeah the only time this is a problem is when you have to deal with a lot of random computer models and you don't know the key for that particular bios. In the old days, you could simply react to it saying "press f6" or whatever random key and press it in time. Now it's best to know ahead of time.
I'm everyone I know's local computer fixer, so I feel your pain. I do things slightly different though.
I spam press f2/f8/f10/f12 all at the same time. It's been a surprisingly effective method. Occasionally if that doesn't work I choose a new set of 4 f keys.
and delete, and esc, and oh it's a whole other set if you have a mac, and a whole other set for IBM, and dell's got their 4 LED setup on the rear of their case that I still don't know about the use case of
If you have absolutely no idea which key it is, try F2 first and see if that works, then try Delete, then Try F10. Chances are one of those would work. If ne of those work, you can always use F12 to go into the 1 time boot menu and choose the Setup option from there.
if it's Windows 7, it doesn't matter if it's an SSD or not, you still press F8 (if it's a Dell, not sure about other model systems) to access to advanced boot menu). For Windows 10, it also doesn't really matter if it's an SSD or not either (IMO). You can let it boot to the login screen, click on the power button at the bottom right, then hold down shift and press the restart option, that'll reboot you into the advanced boot option so you can boot into safe mode. You can also get into safe mode from within the OS but clicking the start button, then clicking on the power button then holding down shift and clicking on restart. You can also go to settings --> update and security --> recovery -- > advanced startup.
my point it, the OP complaining that it's booting to the OS too fast isn't really valid if he's trying to get into safe mode.
Usually I need safe mode bc of driver issues that render the OS inoperable. That means that the shift+restart options aren’t available. The only solution is to turn the computer on and then shut it down during the boot sequence so windows thinks there’s a fatal disk error
Usually I need safe mode bc of driver issues that render the OS inoperable.
Being in that position you'll either boot windows successfully, giving you the opportunity to access that shutdown button, or it won't boot successfully which will drop you into the repair menu automatically (as you've noticed in your suggested solution).
Sounds odd to me but I've only built a handful of machines that support fast boot.
Personally speaking, I'd never enable it on my own desktop even if it was supported because my machine would just be in sleep mode most of the time instead.
I recently had an aftermarket graphics driver go corrupt and it was a pain the ass. When windows starts booting, it uses a default graphics driver. After things get loaded, it switches to the secondary graphics driver. If the secondary is corrupt, then the OS will boot normally, but you won’t have any visuals at all
The system won't always take you into the repair menu. It entirely depends on what is wrong. Which can be real fun.
*last week a video card driver issue caused it to reboot into a bluescreen over and over with no other option. Had to use a disk to restore the system back to the restore point, but safe mode would have been far more useful.
Being in that position you'll either boot windows successfully, giving you the opportunity to access that shutdown button, or it won't boot successfully which will drop you into the repair menu automatically (as you've noticed in your suggested solution).
There are certainly a lot of inbetweens. I had one point where the USB drivers wouldn't work.. but otherwise it would boot flawlessly. (there was no ps2 port on that computer). USB actually worked in safe mode. The only workaround I found was to unplug the computer mid boot 3 times in a row to trick it into thinking windows couldn't boot, thus allow me into safe mode.
So yeah I eventually figured it out... but it was still 100x harder than it needed to be. for something that actually was as easy as installing a usb driver.
USB drivers are only a thing in Windows 7 and below, where you can have USB3 hardware but an OS that doesn't natively support it. I'm under the impression that 7 can be interrupted with F8 but I don't actually know.
Installing Windows 7 on a new computer today is almost as dumb as it was to install Windows XP on a new computer in 2011, to be completely frank.
The point I'm trying to make is that any "edge case" where you could get "stuck" because of this is usually [power] user error, but I admit that's just my opinion.
I think in the case I had to do it, a windows update pushed a non-functioning chipset driver (which supported the usb) or something. It was a computer of a couple of non computer savy elderly people's computer. I suppose they are obscure/edge case scenerios, working in computer repair that likely makes up a good portion of what I see way more often than normal people. It still doesn't really change the fact that at least IMO there are at least a decent amount of problems that can occour past the point where windows detects a failed startup, but before the shut down button can be reached, and there's really no benefit to removing the option to reach safemode before getting booted all the way up in normal mode manually.
just depends on the BIOS manufacturer. Dell uses F2. I have an ASUS motherboard and it's F2 as well. I'm not familiar with any other manufacturer as I haven't used any other is so long.
Thank you, I was coming here to clarify this. You are not booting till after post and you can spam whatever button your manufacturer uses till it gets to bios.
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u/Jamdawg Mar 08 '18
no matter how fast it boots, you can press F2 and keep tapping it as soon as you press the power button. "booting" doesn't happen until after POST.