How to run a System Restore when your computer won’t boot into Windows

System Restore is a powerful tool for reversing detrimental changes to your PC’s Windows installation.

In a nutshell, System Restore allows you to “roll back” the Windows installation to the state it was in at a time before the detrimental changes were made.

For example, lets say that somehow a critical Windows setting gets changed and your system starts doing strange and unexpected things.

You can usually fix this type of issue by simply using System Restore to roll Windows back to a Restore Point that was created a few days earlier.

System Restore is typically launched from within Windows, but what if the issue at hand is so severe that your PC won’t boot up into Windows at all?

Luckily, there’s a way to launch System Restore even when the machine won’t boot into Windows as it usually does. You can simply follow the procedure detailed below to boot your PC into Safe Mode with Command Prompt and run System Restore from there.

If your PC is running Windows 7, booting into “Safe Mode with Command Prompt” is pretty easy. Here’s how:

1 – With the computer powered down, press the power button.

2 – Immediately after pressing the power button, start pressing the F8 key repeatedly until a menu appears on the screen.

3 – Select Safe Mode with Command Prompt from the menu. Your computer should now boot up into Safe Mode and display a DOS-style command prompt.

4 – Once you’re at the command prompt, type rstrui.exe and then press the Enterkey. That should launch the System Restore utility.

If your PC is running either Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, the F8 key for booting into Safe Mode is disabled by default. You can easily enable it however.

I strongly recommend that you enable the F8 key now so that you’ll be able to boot into Safe Mode later in case Windows ever refuses to boot up normally in the future.

After you have enabled the F8 key, the procedure for booting into Safe Mode with Command Prompt” and launching System Restore in Windows 8.1 or 10 is pretty much the same as doing so in Windows 7. Simply follow the steps listed above.