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Comment by robk | Hacker News Reader

"Incidentally, if you want to perform a full “cold” boot (without the kernel being hibernated), simply select Restart from the shutdown menu or run shutdown /s /full /t 0."

Why should it require a command line statement with three switches to simply shutdown?

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Really? Can you explain why you would need to do a full cold boot?

Disk encryption comes to mind (ie you might not want the OS to persist keys that should only exist in RAM), although I haven't investigated this further on Windows 8 yet.

If you are using third-party disk (or anything) encryption tools, the keys would be stored in userspace RAM, which isn't saved to disk by shutdown. It only persists parts of the kernel, and presumably does not persist Bitlocker keys.

Because something has gone wrong at a fairly low level of the OS and you want to reboot to clear it out.

I know theoretically this shouldn't happen, but it does happen all the time - I've not yet seen a system that I've really never ever needed to reboot (excluding my toaster), and previous Windows have not been the least offenders in this regard, so I have no confidence that Windows 8 will be the first where I don't need it.

>reboot to clear it out

That's what the reboot option is for. Can you explain the problem again?

The parent asked why you'd need to perform a full cold boot. I'm suggesting that there are cases where you do.

In context the parent asked why you would need a full cold boot outside of the Restart command. The Restart option does a "full shutdown, followed by a cold boot". There is no need to throw command line flags around, at least not in the scenario you gave.

No he didn't, he just said "Really? Can you explain why you would need to do a full cold boot?". The grandparent was talking about the command line flags as an alternative, but neither my post nor the one I replied to were specifically referring to doing it from the command line.

Did you entirely miss "simply select Restart from the shutdown menu" in those instructions?

Restart != shutdown. Yes I read.

There is also a shut down option, along with restart and sleep.

Shutdown will hibernate session 0, though and thus will not do a full cold boot the next time.

Shutdown /r does the same.

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