Why is it still so hard to get into safe mode?

Question

One of the worst features in Windows 8 is the many, many steps it takes to boot into safe mode... and it doesn't always get you there. And sadly, Microsoft has brought that into the Windows 10 preview.
Let's be real for a second. Safe mode is a valuable tool for it techs, and can be helpful to the home user. Getting there is a friggin' nightmare in Windows 8, and it's no easier in windows 10. The UEFI bios and boot manager doesn't help either.
Bring back a functioning F8 key, will ya?
On another note, why the hell can't you boot from a linux-based cd and find the windows 8/10 based OS. Microsoft's virus removal tools are useless if you can't boot into Windows... and "refreshing" the drive also ONLY works if you can load the
Operating system.Pulling the hard-drive to scan it for virus removal should not be necessary, but it seems to be with Windows 8, 8.1 and 10.

Answer 1

Ran across this article after putting the 10 Tech Preview on my computer last week. Started off with build 9741 and now have 9879 and I just want to totally agree with the poster that Microsoft seems to have forgotten what safe mode is used for, mostly troubleshooting
when something goes wrong and keeps our computers from booting. I stayed away from both 8 and 8.1 and have stayed with 7. So far the tech preview looks OK, and I like the return of the start menu as well as many other familiar Win 7 features and controls.
But, even with 7, I've had endless hours wasted trying to fix the counterintuitive way that Microsoft seems to think (or not think) regarding these sort of issues. I'll gladly give up a couple (or even 30) seconds to have the option to boot into safe mode.
I've fought with Microsoft over and over again about the way they keep trying to automate troubleshooting even when there are very simple manual fixes. Sometimes it seems like they want to just keep users from having the control we want over how our system
works. And it this case it's just plain stupid that you can't choose to boot directly to safe mode by default from a preloading boot menu. Win 7 had terrible problems with "Bootmgr is missing" after even the simplest of issues such as adding files
to a USB or just a bad defrag or user mistake. I spent hours pulling my hair out after such issues and eventually got myself into a hole because of the way Microsoft looked at the issue. 99% of the time I could have fixed my issue by being able to do a repair
install from startup and it never made sense that you could only do an in place or "upgrade" install as they started calling it, If you can already boot into Windows. Lots of good that does when you can't get Windows to boot in the first place. And
so far the Startup repair in Tech preview is just as useless as in Win 7. Except now it's even harder to get to. I played with it a bit to test it and just a simple thing like moving the bootmgr one file down in the directory or just adding 1 small file out
of place was enough to make tech preview unbootable as well when using the older MBR setups. The new startup repair hasn't fixed it once. I don't know what the refresh really does as it doesnt work either. Gives a vague error with no link to a log and no other
information provided , so dont know where to troubleshoot that one.  Win 7 's startup repair almost never worked for me until I learned the trick to run it at least 3 times with reboots and running SFC /offbootdir /offwindir in the middle. All of those
problems could have been fixed by simply allowing us to boot from the install media to re-install without loosing data. I'm glad to see that at least for now you can do a repair install from boot in the current version of 10 Tech Prev. Please keep that for
the later rollout, Microsoft. And stop messing with Safemode, please! I just made the edits to bcdedit to enable the legacy boot so I hope it works. I know it's still early but so far the Tech Preview has been a real challenge. I ran into issues on Win 7 with
missing Vredist C++ files coming up missing after trying to get DirectX 10 to work. There is a stupid loophole there that Direct X will make you delete allx86 and x64 C++ runtimes that it doesn't like, in this case it wouldnt install with the
2005 SP1 C++ redists. After I deleted them to install the Direct X I ran into a whole hell of an issue with corrupted files due to missing components from the  2005 redistribs that Win 7 would basically shutdown and slowly corrupt everything if
any component of that package was missing and then would not allow you to reinstall them if your system was higher than XP yet would not fix corruptions until they were installed. I'm still trying to side fix my Win 7 installs on my other disks as I consitently
cant get certain 2005 C++ redistribs to install. Now having big problems with massive corruptions in Tech Prev, to the point that it becomes totally non responsive and icons and folders almost totally go away in a very short period of time. DISM was
pretty limited in Win 7 so I'm trying to get onto that but the commands are kind of confusing me and it doesn't work consistently and I thing the online store components are not being made available for repair as I get a lot of "failed to obtain image
from provider" messages and it's giving me a lot of problems when I try to mount my iso as a wim file. Hate to say it but I've been working with 10 Tech preview on 2 computers (test out homegroup) and I've installed and reinstalled at least 5 times on
each computer but within 30 minutes of a good install its corrupted again and Dism will stop working all together. Anyway, wish they'd stop messing with our tools. Bring back safemode by default guys.