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I have a T430s with two hard drives that boot two different operating systems running Windows 8. As you know, Windows 8 uses hybrid boot/shutdown, a sort of half-hibernation thing that speeds up booting. When hibernating for real or using hybrid boot, Windows seems to tell the BIOS "Hey, I'm hibernating, skip the boot menu." So when I start up the computer, pressing F12 to choose what device to boot off of won't work - the BIOS ignores it and just boots using the normal boot order, which is super frustrating.

Is there some way to fix this? Maybe a registry setting? I can't find anything in the BIOS but I may be missing something.

phuclv
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Mark Williams
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The BIOS knows nothing about hibernation. It simply loads the bootloader and transfers control to the bootloader. It's then Windows bootloader's job to determine which operating system to boot. When the bootloader sees that a Windows installation is in hibernation then it'll unfreeze that. The only thing you can do at this stage is to cancel the process, discard hibernation data and lose all volatile data in the running system

If you really want to boot another OS while a Windows installation is hibernating then use a different boot manager such as Grub. However be very careful when doing this, because when the hibernated Windows wakes up and see things like locked files have been moved or deleted, opened file suddenly appears bigger... surprise things will happen which may incur data lost. There's a reason Linux mounts Windows partitions as read-only if Windows is hibernating. It's also recommended to disable fastboot if you're dual booting Windows and Linux for the same reason

phuclv
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