Boot into Safe Mode With Windows 8

My laptop running Windows 8.1 decided not to boot this week but instead gave me a blue screen with the error “System Thread Exception Not Handled”. As I’d not installed anything new recently I guessed it could be related to a Video Driver issue, so I tried to Safe Boot - but wait where is Safe Boot in Windows 8? Google and Toms Hardware site to the rescue with this excellent article for resolving the issue. Note the use of in the article of BCDEDIT from the Command Prompt to turn on the legacy Windows boot menu (accessed via pressing F8 during boot).

At the C:\ command prompt type: 

BCDEDIT /SET {DEFAULT} BOOTMENUPOLICY LEGACY

You can dig a bit more into this command on the ‘Windows Developer Center’ site and check out the various options you can specify, including a useful ‘onetimeadvancedoptions’ option to only turn on F8 menu for a one time use on the next boot. For more detail on the Windows 8 Start-up settings including how to restart in Safe Mode from within Windows check out this page on the windows site. Also note that you can use MSConfig (Start > Run > “msconfig.exe”) to restart Windows in Safe Mode too.

To return to the standard Windows 8 boot menu (for faster boot times), once you have resolved your issue, you can run the BCDEDIT command again but this time set the BOOTMENUPOLICY to STANDARD:

At the C:\ command prompt type:

BCDEDIT /SET {DEFAULT} BOOTMENUPOLICY STANDARD

If you get an ‘Access Denied’ message make sure the command prompt window is running as Administrator (right click the shortcut & Run as Administrator).

As for my laptop issue, I used Safe Mode to uninstall my video drivers, enabling me to boot normally and then successfully update the drivers.