Since quite some time I’m running Windows 8 on my Laptop. During this time I did see and track down quite a few bluescreens caused by malware scanners, drivers and last but not least caused by my Linux install. I am pretty sure it was my Linux install as changing back to windows lead to the big bang.

The bluescreen itself indicated a broken filesystem, which was not correct. So I started to search. Narrowing things down step by step I could tell for sure that it had to do with mounting NTFS filesystems – and only after a ‘clean’ shutdown of Win8.

After some time I discovered some strange feature of Windows 8 being enabled by default, named FastBoot.. FastBoot as such does kick in on shutdown – namely every program is terminated and Windows itself is put to some kind of sleep which leaves disk handles active. If you do mount NTFS with read/write support, those file handles are no longer valid, which explains the big bang pretty well.

FastBoot can be disabled by altering the Energy Settings in Windows 8, which also solved the Bluescreens for me. But I cannot tell if Windows 8 boots slower by deactivating FastBoot as I do not notice.