Nah. antonio120's method is much better. Frequently you want safe mode because the computer won't start normally. With the new bootloader, options show up after the OS has already started. If there's a buggered driver keeping you from booting you're high and dry. As well if you want to boot to another OS, you essentially have to wait for win8 to boot, then select another option. This works much better:
Just read this thread and noticed that nobody actually answered the original question: What the hell do you do if you CAN'T BOOT Windows, and pressing F8 on bootup has no effect. I haven't actually confirmed that this works, since I really can't be bothered to burn a Windows 8 disc and I wiped my USB earlier, but it should be possible to boot into Windows Setup from a Windows 8 DVD, press Shift+F10 to bring up a command prompt, and use bcdedit to access the BCD store on your Windows 8 drive. From there, you can enable the boot menu, and access it as you would normally. Just thought I'd post this in case anyone in the future is searching to a solution to this and comes across this thread
haha i have the same question, ALL answers and solutions are from Windows, but what if i cant access to it and i didn't executed this bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy before?
Try my method Basically you need to boot into Windows Setup, bring up a command prompt using Shift+F10, and then use bcdedit with the /store flag to specify which BCD store you're editing. If it's on that small (350mb with Windows 8) System Reserved boot partition, you may have to use Diskpart to assign a letter to it temporarily in order to access it, something like Z:\. You can then do, "bcdedit /store Z:\Boot\bcd /enum" to view the entries, and change them as indicated previously in this thread. Just don't forget to specify /store for each command.
+1. These commands are all well and good for expert users who want to cover themselves ahead of time by enabling a safe mode menu before they actually need it, or people with already working machines. But it doesn't completely answer the upcoming scenario faced by a technician called to fix someone's Packard Bell s**tbox that's been infected with something and won't start up. I'm definitely hoping for a quicker system than having to mess with a setup disc and use bcdedit, but at least that will do in a pinch.
Don't ever try that... on usb drive it edits the bcd file used in booting the usb drive and in case of dvd (I don't but I guess) it will give some error saying access denied or unable to write the data or something like that...
If u want the graphical menu back go into an elevated command prompt and enter... bcdboot c:\windows all it does is bring the graphical menu back it doesn't change or hurt anything. Oh and why can't u get to safe mode? If you navigate thru the advanced menu on the graphical interface u can get to the advanced startup options which includes safe mode.