Ooooh Eighty-eighty-eighty... Ooooh, how I'm tired of your stupidness, Windows 8/8.1!

I have 8.1 installed on a 2nd HDD as a 2nd OS just in case + so I would getting used to it by time just in case next MS OSes will be same jerk-like. Today I launched it first time for like a month and it didn't surprise me which is as usual actually. By saying "did not surprise" I mean "gave another epic lag".

I wanted to use Display Driver Uninstaller and had to do Safeboot (launch in Safe Mode). For some reason I decided to set launch options in OS settings (msconfig) instead of F8 while booting and that was a mistake. Not as big as installing 8.1 but still good enough. Take attention that I did not select checkbox "make this settings permanent" however that checkbox is Cr@p Number1 in whole OS because I have no idea what it does because as it seems all you change there actually IS permanent.

I reboot and here we go! WINDOWS 8.1 DID NOT LAUNCH IN SAFE MODE! When I say did not launch I don't mean that it launched in another way. Operating System could launch in usual (NOT SAFE) mode and DID NOT launch in mode which suspects 100% super safe way to launch! The last way to launch if all others did not work! It was just a blank black screen and that's it. Oh yeah, whenever I moved the mouse I saw arrow and Safe Boot text in every corner. That's it. No Ctr+Alt+Del or Alt+F4 were working there. just nothing more.

Also whenever I pressed Power button it kinda power drained laptop because Hard driver was clicking... except USB ports were still giving power and laptop immediately tried to launch Windows 8 instead of Windows 7 on the first SSD.
Start-Up recovery built-in option didn't help and for some reason there were on recovery point found.
F8 while boot worked only sometimes and no matter what I selected there (normal start or Safe Mode) it always tried to boot into Safe Mode and failed.

All which is installed there are drivers and AeroGlass + Classic Shell. If you say that perhaps it is my fault because those 2 programs could spoil SafeBoot I say it is Windows 8 which forced me to install thirdparty software to get basic functionality, Gosh!

So here is what I had to do to recover the OS:
1. Press Shift+F8 while booting.
2. Select some advanced menus to finally get to Command line.
3. Type bcdedit and Enter. You gonna see that Safeboot is set to minimal or whatever.
4. Type bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot and Enter. Now reboot. Download proper Windows 7 distributive and reinstall OS

 

Simple fix:

How To Clean Install Windows 7 [Complete Walkthrough]

 

Indeed, the solution to most Windows 8 problems.

 

LOL @ the title ...

I completely feel your pain ...

I intentionally ordered my laptop from a "boutique" builder so that I could run Win 7 64 bit instead of Windows 8 ... seems all the major builders are shipping Win 8 by default ... can't stand it ...

Windows 7 is actually pretty acceptable once you tweak the hell out of it ... can be set up to run pretty fast and lean with the right modifications ...

Best of luck

 

Windows 8 is a real OS? I thought that's a tablet OS that *can* be installed on a PC if you are ready to deal with its crappiness such as the above or horrible Wireless Networks management or the forced Sky Drive integration or the Metro crap even if you can hide it it will still be running in the background or the slower internet access? gosh, I could go on forever!

Stick to a REAL OS my friend! 7 FTW

 

For Windows 8.1, the way I have gotten into Safe Mode before, on an otherwise bootable machine, is at the login screen, click the power icon, then shift-restart. It loads some diagnostics-like options and a Safe Mode boot option is in there, which does not require any command line stuff. It's like the traditional menu.