{"id":6443,"date":"2012-10-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/10\/01\/whats-the-difference-between-f5-and-f8-at-the-boot-screen\/"},"modified":"2012-10-01T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-01T07:00:00","slug":"whats-the-difference-between-f5-and-f8-at-the-boot-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20121001-00\/?p=6443","title":{"rendered":"What&#039;s the difference between F5 and F8 at the boot screen?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ian B wondered <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10040566\"> what the difference is between pressing <kbd>F5<\/kbd> and <kbd>F8<\/kbd> while Windows is booting<\/a>.\n I have no idea either. My strategy was to just mash on the function keys, space bar, <kbd>DEL<\/kbd> key, anything else I can think of. Keep pressing them all through the boot process, and maybe a boot menu will show up.\n The <kbd>F5<\/kbd> hotkey was introduced in Windows&nbsp;95, where the boot sequence hotkeys were as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><kbd>ESC<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot in text mode. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>F5<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot in Safe Mode. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>Shift<\/kbd>+<kbd>F5<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot to Safe Mode MS-DOS. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>Ctrl<\/kbd>+<kbd>F5<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot to Safe Mode MS-DOS with drive compression disabled. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>Alt<\/kbd>+<kbd>F5<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot with LOADTOP=0 for Japanese systems. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>F6<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot in Safe Mode with networking. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>F4<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot to previous version of MS-DOS. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>Ctrl<\/kbd>+<kbd>F4<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot to previous version of MS-DOS with drive compression disabled. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>F8<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot to menu. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>Shift<\/kbd>+<kbd>F8<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot with step-by-step confirmation. <\/li>\n<li><kbd>Ctrl<\/kbd>+<kbd>F8<\/kbd> &#8211; Boot with step-by-step confirmation with drive compression disabled. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> Man, that&#8217;s an insane number of boot options all buried behind obscure function keys. Boy am I glad we got rid of them. This frees up room in my brain for things like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beanie_Baby\"> Beanie Baby trivia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> <b>Bonus chatter<\/b>: The next generation of computers boots so fast that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/b8\/archive\/2012\/05\/22\/designing-for-pcs-that-boot-faster-than-ever-before.aspx\"> there&#8217;s no time to hit any of these hotkeys<\/a>! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ian B wondered what the difference is between pressing F5 and F8 while Windows is booting. I have no idea either. My strategy was to just mash on the function keys, space bar, DEL key, anything else I can think of. Keep pressing them all through the boot process, and maybe a boot menu will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-6443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Ian B wondered what the difference is between pressing F5 and F8 while Windows is booting. I have no idea either. My strategy was to just mash on the function keys, space bar, DEL key, anything else I can think of. Keep pressing them all through the boot process, and maybe a boot menu will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}