F8 boot key disabled?

psychok9

New Member
Hello everyone!
Some weeks ago I've installed EasyBcd program.
At the moment I'm not using dual/triple/etc boot menu features, I've only 1 OS on boot list (Windows 7 x64 Utimate) and because of that, pressing F8 on boot don't show the classic recovery menu list.
How can I fix that?
I don't like show up menu (when I don't need at boot), and I want the fastest possible boot .

Thank you a lot for your answers and your great program!
 
Last edited:
That's typical behavior for the MS boot menu.

The trick is to repeatedly bash the F8 key right after BIOS POST completes, till right before the Windows key appears.

Of note: you can use EasyBCD to add Safe Mode, Safe Mode Network, etc. entries to the standard bootloader, and give it a timeout of something like 1 sec to make your life easier.
 
Actually, REAGENTC is part of Windows 7. Look in the System32 folder for ReAgentc.exe. I have used this command on computers without WAIK installed. It must be run from an elevated command prompt.

You can do some interesting things with this tool. One thing is to add a .wim image (created with ImageX) as a recovery option to reinstall Windows from another partition on the same drive.
 
I'm gonna go ahead and bump this because it's what you get from Googling 'easybcd f8'.

I used EasyBCD to get rid of remnants of a 2nd OS. But even with 1 OS, the 'Select OS' menu would still show when booting. It seemed the only way to stop this was to select the option to skip the boot menu. Unfortunately it's doing this that stops the F8 advanced boot menu from working. To get it back I had to open an elevated command prompt (command prompt run as Administrator) and input this:

bcdedit /deletevalue {bootmgr} displaybootmenu


And now my F8 works again.
 
If a single-entry BCD spuriously presents an unnecessary boot menu, it indicates that the BCD is corrupted (luckily in a minor non-fatal way which doesn't prevent a successful boot).
Though "skip boot menu" will circumvent the problem (it's effectively running the opposite bcdedit command for you), it doesn't remove the source corruption.
You can do that by using EasyBCD > BCD Backup/Repair > "reset BCD config" and getting a clean (empty) version.
DON'T reboot without first adding back an entry for your Vista/7/8 OS.
(EasyBCD will warn you, but you'd be amazed how many people ignore the warning, boot the PC and then post "EasyBCD broke my system !"
 
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