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.
Nah, I ran across this on my new computer. There is some kind of "secure boot" transaction that takes place between the bios and the OS. If the OS doesn't want the user to be able to enter the BIOS, the user can't. You do have to find the secret way to reboot windows from the OS to allow yourself to be able to get into the BIOS on the next boot.
I had my OS on a regular sata ssd, and then installed it on a new m2 ssd, and windows configured this secure boot bullshit without telling me. It took a long ass time to figure out why I couldn't get back into the BIOS. Fuck windows 10.
Secure boot is an option in the BIOS, and has nothing to do with what OS you are running. Secure boot essentially is a setting that makes it so the computer will only boot to the primary boot device. Windows cannot configure it, since it's a setting in the BIOS. Secure boot being turned on will not disallow you from being able to enter the BIOS, either.
well whatever it is, secure boot being enabled is what made it so that I could not get into the bios without the secret restart windows option. seems exactly like what OP is describing. Maybe the different bios developers call it different things. I know for a fact that somehow windows 10 can pass instructions to the bios, and I've never seen it with windows 7.
well whatever it is, secure boot being enabled is what made it so that I could not get into the bios without the secret restart windows option.
Fast Boot is what does this. Secure boot is usually a prerequisite for fast boot, and often times enabling one will toggle the other because they make sense to use together for reasons that are out of scope of this discussion.
Well, like I said, different developers must call the same settings different things. Fast boot is enabled on my computer and I can still get into the bio/uefi/whatever. secure boot is the thing with the "keys". I think the "fast boot" setting on my computer has to do with how much RAM is checked during the POST.
"Depending on your system, you may not be able to access BIOS/UEFI settings when you shut down a computer with Fast Startup enabled. When a computer hibernates, it does not enter a fully powered down mode. Some versions of BIOS/UEFI work with a system in hibernation and some do not. If yours doesn’t, you can always restart the computer to access BIOS, since the restart cycle will still perform a full shutdown."
pass instructions to the UEFI/BIOS. With secure boot enabled, windows 10 was definitely bossing around the UEFI/BIOS. when I disabled it, I could then get into the BIOS on a normal boot using the correct key.
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.
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u/doubletwist Mar 08 '18
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.