Win10 "fast start up" (quick boot) Warning / Suggestion for users

Yep actually it is associated with Intel rapid fire features and win8 and now 10's fast startup is more a hibernation state than anything else better known from win8 people as Fake shutdown :)

CMD = command prompt as admin and using

powercfg -h off

Will do a lot of good too

Good for ssd's= solid state drive users as well since that will stop a hiberfil.sys from being created and rewritten constantly equal to the amount of installed ram/ memory :)

There were quite a few bricked hard drives during win-10 testing I had one myself that could not be woke up :D

But yes if you do the cmd method the fast start (recommended) listing in power options will not be there anymore ;)

If you don't do it win-10 might reactivate fast startup after a large update

Win-10 has a nasty habit of reactivating setting that are off but on by default

That is in fact what bricked my older hdd an update reactivated fast start ;)

Oh almost forgot about the best part of fast start

It will corrupt other disks/ drives :)

Thank you, Sir, a lot. You were of a great warning-help.

In my opinion, I think win10 users should know about "fast start up", it was a surprise to me, maybe you all already know, but I think it's worth a warning, so here goes:

Win10 fast start up, aka quick boot, is touted as a feature of win10, but what you may not know is it is the default when installed, and I think it assisted in forcing a hard drive failure.  It can be disabled via control panel, power options, and I recommend users disable it.  It doesn't make boot times that much better anyway, a couple minutes perhaps, but I don't think it's worth it in the long run.

So, how did this feature help me loose a hard drive?  I'm convinced it was a contributing factor, the drive was getting on in years, but it was helped out the door by win10.  This is what I believe to be a key issue in the way fast start up works: it does not allow various commands / utilities to see win10 as fully shut down.  Basically it takes an image of system state when you shut down, and boots quicker by using that "image" when it is turned back on.  So what? 

Well, let's pretend you have a start up issue, and it happens to be a big one, like maybe the MBR (main boot record) has become corrupted.  Win10 displays one of it's blue screen messages and enters the auto-fix routine, and, it can and does sometimes go through this multiple times.  Suppose it can't boot because it can't fix itself?  Now you get a frowny face on your blue screen.  HONESTLY! a stupid frowny face :( and a cryptic message.  So you, being a savvy user, quickly slap in your windows recovery CD and start that journey.  Like perhaps you want to run check disk, or fix MBR, or any one of several things you could do.  And --- here it is, the killer --- each and every time you do ANYTHING that would involve writing to the drive, you get a message such as "....drive is locked..."  or "...device I/O error..."  or the lovely "....drive is un-mountable...".  I discovered this the hard way, by experience.  And I believe the reason I was getting these messages is because "....windows is not fully shut down, go back and fully shut down windows and try again."  Now that last quote did not come from windows, it came from a third party cd based boot tool that assists in data recovery from a drive that cannot be written to.  And of course, with the bad drive it becomes a catch 22, because the drive cannot be booted to windows, therefore you can't disable the quick shut down image, and therefore various utilities, such as windows command and such, are presented with a locked drive which can never be unlocked.

I discovered this because in my situation, I was recovering data from said drive, and was trying to copy it to my brand new drive which had win10 freshly installed, shut down, and booted from CD to enter the data recovery tool outside the windows environment.  I could see the bad drive's files, I could select them for copy, but it would not write to the new drive, because it was LOCKED.  Why was it locked??  Because of fast start up being enabled, and that nasty little "image" sitting there, blocking everything.  I exited the utility, rebooted from the new drive into windows,,,, googled "how to fully shut down windows 10", and there was the answer,,,, "disable fast start up".  Which I did, shut down, then rebooted from CD, launched the recovery tool, and now I was able to copy from the old drive and paste to the new one.  The old drive, still locked, and forever locked, was only available in a read only state, even to that very powerful tool.

From now on, "fast start up" will NEVER be enabled on any win10 install that I have control of.  Just thought I'd pass this painful lesson on, it may help someone else.  If you want to read the original post on this, here is a link:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/bsod-with-unmounted-drive/7708084e-bac7-417d-ab0e-5587528fcff0

Cactus, 

I came upon your thread while trying to research fixes for a similar though not identical issue. I have downloaded ubcd and plan to run it on usb drive with the ultimate goal of just seeing if I can retrieve any files with parted magic. If that is all i intend to do, do I need to customize ubcd in any way for Windows 10? And how big a drive am I going to need? Sorry for asking but I've searched around for these answers and it seems like most of the ubcd help info and tutorials are written for people who already know what they are doing

Alison;

well,,, I'm not an expert for sure, but what I used:

Now, this was a while back, and I'm pushing 70, so you are saddled with my memory here.  Also, my BP was plenty high, as this win10 snuck up on me and it got installed, really before I wanted it to be.  Also, don't even bother with support, this is way more than they want to piddle with.  If I say something here that is patently wrong folks, please jump in!

That said, I somehow found UBCD, my disk, which I'm looking at now, says v5.3.5, I downloaded the whole mess and then let it make the disk, I think it's a DVD.  Anyway, got the disk, had to use another PC of course, since mine was bricked.  The disk is bootable, so that will get you going.  The disk has utilities on it.  I have partition magic, but really it was pretty much useless.  What's in my head tells me I wound up using UBCD to get the stuff off.  It got utilities that let you examine the HDD, and it reports what it can do, so it was fairly easy to use.

Unfortunately, my HDD seemed to be toast, UBCD could not fix the boot record, but it could find a bunch of my files, by directory, so it gave some hope.  Other things I have are MS Win 10 media disk, but I don't think I ever used it for anything.  Also, Partition magic was useless in this case, and I've got a thing labeled "MHDD boot disk" and I honestly have no clue what that's about, if it's not in my head, I probably did not use it.

What I recall doing was a trip to best buy, for a new TB hard drive.  On this I installed Win 10, possibly from that media drive.  This was during the free "upgrade period", meaning I was an unsolicited and unknowing beta tester.  So, I had my old Win 7 disk, which was recognized as proof of purchase when it went through the install procedure on the new drive.

Next, I put my bricked drive in the PC as a second hard drive, and of course, windows could do nothing with it as expected, a brick is a brick.  But, I booted the PC using UBCD, and then I could see my new drive, and my brick, and was then able to move (copy) the needed files over to the new drive, and that's what saved me.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to ask if you need more.

cheers

cactus

PS - you need a drive large enough to hold the data you intend to retrieve.

PPS - I gave up on partition magic, it was not magic enough, UBCD did it all (I seem to recall it uses some pieces of partition magic in it's lineup of utilities)

PPPS - no need to customize UBCD, it doesn't care what you are using for an op system, it boots like a virtual PC would, it's all self contained.  All it cares about is what you want it to do.

sorry I forgot your questions....

Alison; UBCD is a sort of make your own boot disk, depending on what you want on it.  It is not windows, it could not care less about windows.  So, what I did, was go to the site, download the UBCD stuff, and all the stuff I could find in the list that dealt with file recovery and hard drive repair.  

Since you are a slightly different track, you would probably have other stuff in there.  I can't tell you what to use, but I can point  you to where to get it.

Once you think you've got it all, you make the boot CD by putting the various items on it.  Then you boot from the CD, not windows, just put the cd or other bootable media, in the drive and let it go.  In it's bare form it includes various utilities, some you run directly from the view you get after it boots, other items you use commands to run those utilities.  I recall several items from partition magic were in the core.

I'm not sure if this board allows links, if yes, go here and start reading:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

If the link doesn't carry through, then google UBCD and pick the first item that comes up, which is "ultimate Boot CD - Overview".  There it has the download for UBCD and download links for at least a 100 other utilities that you can put on your boot cd.  At the top there is a screen shot of what UBCD looks like after boot, and version 5.3.7 is still the latest version, which is what I used.  AFAIK it doesn't care what drives you have or how they are hooked up, if they are readable in any fashion UBCD will see them.  Then you can fix stuff on the target drive, or you can move stuff off the target and onto a good drive, which is what I had to do in order to get my data.  Windows had totally hosed up the boot record, and there was no way around that.  No other utility could see anything on the drive, except for UBCD.

good luck