Safer Mode

Thanks for publishing my question and your answer in the recent issue; but your suggestion didn’t work. I tried that seven times, powering down. The machine never came up far enough or went into “waiting” to get to any recovery choices. It does now if I force power off at just the right time (after the BIOS screen, when the circle of dots starts to spin).

But the recovery media created from the Fall Creators Update doesn’t have a “safe mode” I could find. I did find that if I used the recovery media and “Advanced,” and booted to a command prompt, I could use bcdedit (“bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal”) to set the PC to boot into safe mode after being turned off. Once the problem is resolved, you get back to a normal boot using msconfig to turn off safe mode.

I also talked to Microsoft support via a callback. If they had come up with your answer, I would not have lost everything. Their response was to use the manufacturer’s recovery media, which is impossible when you build your own PCs. Then they said I would have to install from scratch.

– Lee Boszak

EXECUTIVE EDITOR ALAN DEXTER RESPONDS: It’s a pity you had to perform a complete system reinstall, especially if you weren’t planning on doing so, but it sounds as though you’ve learned a lot in the process. The tip of using bcdedit to enable safe mode once again is worth passing on to other readers— hopefully, printing your experiences will mean that someone else doesn’t have go through the same thing.