Windows 10: Disable Fast Boot in multiboot environments

If you are running Windows 10 in multiboot environments, you must disable the Quick Launch feature.

The so-called "Fast Boot" first came with Windows 8. Its purpose is to reduce the time required to boot the system. When shutting down, Windows uses a trick to speed up the next boot.

Before shutting down, Windows 8.1 - 10 terminates all applications running in the background and closes the user session. But the Windows kernel does not stop, as in Windows 7. From Windows 8 onwards, the operating system writes parts of RAM with the kernel image to a file when it shuts down.

So in the next boot, the status of the saved system (memory image, process status) is read by hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) and restart the necessary drivers.

The advantage of this approach is that when you use hibernation mode, much less data is backed up than in Windows 7 hibernation mode (in Windows 7, memory images also back up to hibernation file ). So at startup, the system is ready to run again much faster than with a conventional boot.

Problems with multiboot

However, there are drawbacks to a quick boot, especially in multiboot environments with Windows 10. Fast Boot will present you with many problems when other operating systems are installed on your PC. Especially if you have a fast computer with SSD / NvME in Windows 10, you should seriously consider disabling fast boot.

The hiberfil.sys hibernation file simply becomes huge by storing the kernel image on machines with a lot of RAM. Then, loading this file takes longer than it takes to boot the operating system and load the kernel.

Also, when restarting to change operating system, the process is slowed down by a quick boot. In fact, if the system you want to boot is Linux then you will have problems with the file system.

The shutdown in Windows 10 does not shut down the computer completely