Windows 10 recovery mode kicks in when held in breakpoint

Even with ‘recoveryenabled’ set to no in bcdedit if windows 10 is held on a breakpoint for too long it kicks into recovery mode.

Its a new test PC I have, didnt see it on the old one. Are there any other settings that affect this? I have goolged but with no luck.

Thanks in advance for your help.

If the target is spontaneously rebooting itself while at a breakpoint then
you’re probably hitting the system’s thermal trip point. I worked on a
prototype system from a customer that did this once, it made debugging a
Mission Impossible-esque adventure (I could get in about 1-2 minutes of
debugging before I had to hit GO and resume the system).

I’m not sure about why it’s still rebooting into recovery mode though. If
you just hard reboot your test machine does it NOT boot into the recovery
mode?

-scott
OSR
@OSRDrivers

wrote in message news:xxxxx@windbg…

Even with ‘recoveryenabled’ set to no in bcdedit if windows 10 is held on a
breakpoint for too long it kicks into recovery mode.

Its a new test PC I have, didnt see it on the old one. Are there any other
settings that affect this? I have goolged but with no luck.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Just sitting in the debugger with a breakpoint shouldn’t cause recovery to kick in, unless the system reboots (e.g. due to thermal protection on account of overheating, as Scott mentions below). If I remember correctly, in the default configuration, recovery tends to be triggered by several consecutive failures to boot (e.g. you rebooted before a boot to desktop several times in a row).

You may find it convenient to disable some of the recovery features for test systems that frequently get rebooted when debugging early boot issues. I typically use this on my test machines for that purpose :

bcdedit -set bootstatuspolicy ignoreallfailures

If you prefer to use the legacy text-based boot menu (e.g. to conveniently switch between boot configurations in case the test OS becomes unbootable), you might also find it useful to enable that on your test machine :

bcdedit -set bootmenupolicy legacy

However, that is orthogonal to recovery mode.

  • S (Msft)

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Scott Noone
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 10:03 AM
To: Kernel Debugging Interest List
Subject: Re:[windbg] Windows 10 recovery mode kicks in when held in breakpoint

If the target is spontaneously rebooting itself while at a breakpoint then you’re probably hitting the system’s thermal trip point. I worked on a prototype system from a customer that did this once, it made debugging a Mission Impossible-esque adventure (I could get in about 1-2 minutes of debugging before I had to hit GO and resume the system).

I’m not sure about why it’s still rebooting into recovery mode though. If you just hard reboot your test machine does it NOT boot into the recovery mode?

-scott
OSR
@OSRDrivers

wrote in message news:xxxxx@windbg…

Even with ‘recoveryenabled’ set to no in bcdedit if windows 10 is held on a breakpoint for too long it kicks into recovery mode.

Its a new test PC I have, didnt see it on the old one. Are there any other
settings that affect this? I have goolged but with no luck.

Thanks in advance for your help.


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It turns out the latest board I am working on has some FW that gets a keep alive message from a service. If it loses this it power cycles the board, which explains it.

Why it should boot back into recovery mode though is odd, since recoveryenabled is set off, but thanks for the input guys.