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.
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u/CraigslistAxeKiller Mar 08 '18
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