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Abhishek Ray
Asked: 2022-02-03 04:48:52 +0800 CST

Exit safe mode remotely

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I rebooted a Windows 10 machine into 'Safe Mode with Networking'. It is a physical machine that resides on-site (at a remote location) and does not have ILO (or similar features). I need to exit from safe mode from that machine. I tried the below procedures, but it did not work -

  1. Rebooting the machine (it goes into safe mode with networking again)
  2. Trying to edit the boot.ini file (c$ or admin$ is not accessible either. Have tried the 'Invoke-Command' cmdlet and 'PSExec')
  3. Trying to access registry settings (disallowed)
  4. Trying to enable the 'Remote Desktop Services' and 'Server' services by remotely connecting to the services console.
  5. Restoring it from backup (since it is a Physical machine, I would have to be present onsite to restore it)
  6. Tried PSSession, but PSRemoting is disabled, unable to start Windows Management Service either.

The methods tried by me did not work. I assume I have to go onsite to exit from safe mode. Is there any other way to exit the machine from safe mode?

windows powershell windows-10 windows-server-2016 windows-batch

1 Answers

  1. If you are able to restart computer using Restart-Computer PowerShell command, this means that you have WMI access to it (Restart-Computer works via WMI).
    This means that you should also be able to use Invoke-WmiMethod command to run any command on the remote computer. For example, you could use bcdedit to modify startup configuration.

    Try this first to make sure you can do it:

    Invoke-WmiMethod –ComputerName $ComputerName -Class 'Win32_Process' -Name 'create' -ArgumentList 'bcdedit /enum'

    The ReturnValue property is populated with a 0 if the command is completed successfully.
    Sadly, this method does not provide access to command output (StdOut).

    If the test is successful, then you can try using bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot command to remove SafeBoot flag and restart the computer again. Please consider your risks and test the command before running it.

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