Grub and Safe Mode

[grimm003]

I just thought of something. Can I make an entry in my grub.conf file to boot directly into windows safe mode? I would hardly use it, but it just seems like tapping F6 or F8(I forget) is so primitive. Or so microsoft...

[kel_p]

I just thought of something. Can I make an entry in my grub.conf file to boot directly into windows safe mode? I would hardly use it, but it just seems like tapping F6 or F8(I forget) is so primitive. Or so microsoft...

No.
GRUB calls Windows without any pre-knowledge of the kernel. GRUB assumes that the boot-images will be found on the partition found in the chainload-command (most often hd0,0) and mounted by Windows's bootloader.
GRUB passes the control of the boot sequence to Windows-bootloader, called chainloading.. GNU/Linux is not able to directly boot Windows. And so has no real control over the bootprocess of Windows at all..

[MRD]

If you can tell Windows to do it, then the same will happen when you chainload grub... it just uses the windows loader.

Just out of curiosity why would you want windows to always default to safe mode?

[grimm003]

I thought grub would be able to pass a command along to the windows bootloader. Thinking about it now, I guess the only way would be if you could directly tell the windows bootloader which version to boot at the same time as grub passes control to the bootloader, and it probably just doesn't work like that.

I wasn't wanting to always boot into safe mode, but rather have a separate grub entry for windows in safe mode. I seem to have a really short delay now when selecting windows from grub and already having it beginning to load no I need to be really quick pressing the button.

[MRD]

It might be possible, but it would be very tricky. You'd have to set up multiple windows boot loaders and have one default to safe mode, on different partitions, and chain load different ones. Not worth it imo.

[David]

I know with earlier versions of windows you could have it pop up a menu asking if you wanted windows or safe mode. Might be possible with Vista and/or XP? ie. it acted like you'd hit F8 every time.