OS menu often not shown.

Steve17

Active Member
I've been investigating the OS menus when using Secure Boot and TPM. There are several problems, but there is one that is the big problem.

The OS menu will often become not shown at the slightest provocation. One way that causes it to be a no show is changing the default OS. That can be fixed by changing the default OS back to the original. There are other changes that can cause the menu to be not shown also, and getting the menu back can require a lot of tinkering with EasyBCD or adding or removing some disk drives.

When the menu is not shown, the menu is still read by the system and the default OS is loaded.

There is a box to check on EasyBCD to skip the display but it has no effect.

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I will report this to Microsoft, but I don't expect they will care about it. Has anyone here looked at this?

P.S. Interesting factoid? When I'm getting the Microsoft OS menu, it only appears after a power on, not a restart. When I'm getting the EasyBCD menu, it appears in all cases, restart and power on.
 
Thanks. It is interesting that the Microsoft menu with the tiles doesn't display after a restart, only a power on. The text menu does display after a restart.

When testing, the "tile" menu is a real pain because I have to cycle power to get it. The text display menu only requires a restart.

Has anyone tried to find why the menu will sometimes go into the "don't show the menu" state when making routine changes to the menu or drives?
 
Tick the "Use metro " box if you want the GUI boot menu.
The "Windows boot manager item in the boot menu is a UEFI feature.
Presumably you have two EFI System Partitions on different devices.
That could be one of the problems that's making your tests a bit squiffy. UEFI iis designed to operate all resources through one.
 
Thanks for the info.

Yes, I want a minimum of 2 bootable drives. And probably no more than the minimum because it seems the more I have, and the more operating system installations I have, the more troubles I have.

I read somewhere that Microsoft was aware that some computers needed to be highly reliable so they were all right with more than one bootable drive. So I had to make a choice. Did I want a highly reliable or lowly reliable computer. I decided on highly reliable, after a great deal of thought. :blush:

I disagree about the metro for the tiles menu. I get the tiles menu whenever I install a Windows. After a few modifications, it either becomes a "no show" menu or the text menu.

I installed the latest "alpha" Win11 today that replaced the beta I had been using. I then got the GUI menu without the metro box being checked. What a menu it was with 7 OS entries. 3 of the entries were for operating systems that no longer existed. Somehow the system remembered them.

I used EasyBCD to change the generic "Windows 11" entry and while doing it I checked the metro box. When I rebooted, the menu was a "no show". Then I used EasyBCD to remove the 3 entries for nonexistant OSs. When I clicked "save changes", I saw the check for metro disappear. When I rebooted, I got the GUI menu.

Anyway I now have something else to play with when I want to get a no show menu to show.
 
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