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Windows 10 Server TP has a new feature called "soft-restart" that claims to go back to bootloader without resetting devices thus resulting in a faster reboot.

How do I actually invoke a soft-restart?

Searching product installed help yields no results, and I could not find online product documentation.

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  • fpaste.org/151256/61554131 - this is the output from the two commands
    – Costin Gușă
    Nov 16, 2014 at 16:31
  • I wonder if such a feature merits the fuzz: If you ever come into a situation where a server OS needs rebooting, a few extra seconds from device resets should not cause much worry ...
    – Hagen von Eitzen
    Nov 16, 2014 at 21:41
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    @HagenvonEitzen Rolling out cluster-aware updates to a farm of two hundred servers? We might be talking cumulatively hours of time off of that process.
    – Ryan Ries
    Nov 17, 2014 at 1:04
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    @HagenvonEitzen It's not a few extra seconds. On some servers (e.g. HP Proliant) it could be 5 to 15 minutes!
    – Michael Hampton
    Sep 23, 2016 at 21:35
  • so apparently this has been eventually pulled back from server 2016 and delayed for until server 2019[1]; currently in the latest insider build the commands exists but they take you through a full POST initialization. [1] web.archive.org/web/20181211135310/https://…
    – Costin Gușă
    Dec 11, 2018 at 13:51

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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C:\> shutdown.exe /soft /r /t 0

For a "soft" reboot. The /t 0 simply means "do it immediately (0-second delay.)"

You will also find the Powershell equivalent is:

Restart-Computer -Soft

But of course, the -Soft parameter is not documented yet, because tech preview.

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  • I have tried both shutdown and powershell solutions, the command line switches are accepted but the machine does a regular reboot instead. I will wait to mark the answer as accepted until this really works. Perhaps is this due to nature of technical preview of the software. Has anyone actually tried performing a soft restart to confirm the feature is implemented and, if it worked, what is the build number on which it worked?
    – Costin Gușă
    Nov 18, 2014 at 15:41
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    While this feature was available in some older technical previews of Server 2016, it is not available in the last one (TP5) and it is doubtful it will make it into the final version. Maybe sometime later?
    – Peter Hahndorf
    Sep 24, 2016 at 8:16

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