For long Windows Safe boot option has been life savior for admins and PC technicians. The Windows Safe boot option can be accessed by pressing F8 keyboard shortcut when Windows booting. The main advantage of windows safe boot is, it only boots Windows with all essential drivers and core processes hence if your machine is infected with malware or virus is can be easily removed in safe boot. Safe boot mode is also useful when you have conflicting drives which is crashing your system in regular boot and only option to uninstall those drivers is safe boot mode.
To our surprise safe boot option in Developer preview of Windows 8, the successor of Windows 7 which is still under development is not available even if you press F8 key during boot. The only option you get it Reset and Refresh (new features of Windows
. It doesn’t mean you cannot get Windows 8 Safe boot option at all, thanks to Juan Antonio Diaz for finding the way to enable & add Windows 8 Safe Boot Mode to Windows 8 boot menu.
If you want to have your hands on Windows 8 Safe Boot then here is step by step guide along with video tutorial on how to enable it.
How to Enable Windows 8 Safe Boot Mode
1. Boot into normal Windows 8 Developer Preview Mode
2. Now press CTRL+C to bring up Windows 8 Search and form list of apps right click on Command Promote (CMD)
3. Click on Advance at the bottom of the screen and select Run as Administrator option.
4 Now type following command at Command prompt.
bcdedit /enum /v
This will list all the valid boot entries.
5. In the list make sure you select & copy the identifier GUID of Windows Developer Preview and not of any other OS which you may have on your PC.
The GUID identifier will look like this {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}
6. Now type following command at CMD
Bcdedit /copy {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} /d “Windows Developer Preview – Safe Boot”
Make sure you past your identifier GUID in place of “X”, also you can have any description instead of “Windows Developer Preview – Safe Boot”. Whatever you put in your description that will appear on boot screen menu.
7. Now type msconfig at cmd and under boot tab select the entry you recently added.
8. Now check the Safe Boot in boot options and check “make all boot settings permanent” and click on Apply.
9. A system configuration message of committing changes will be displayed, click on Yes and press OK button of msconfig window.
10. Restart the system for changes to take effect.
As soon as your system reboots you will notice a new entry will added to Windows Boot menu with description you had setup in step 6.
To boot in to safe boot click on that boot entry and viola your Windows 8 will boot into safe boot.
Check out below video tutorial if you are finding it difficult to follow above steps.
How to Add & Enable Windows 8 Safe Mode Option
