Is there a way to restart without shutting down first on Windows? On Linux this is possible using kexec and serves to minimize downtime. What happens is that one does not pass through the bootloader stage and no BIOS is seen.
Windows – Restart without shutdown on Windows
rebootshutdownwindows
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I asked the IT guys to try removing the PCI/PCIE cards that were installed to see if they were affecting the shutdown process.
Sure enough, removing a Moschip Semiconductor serial/parallel port PCIE device resolved the problem.
Straight from Microsoft Blog:
Here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).
Use of multiple cores: It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well.
Shutdown+TurnOn≡ColdBoot: Another important thing to note about Windows 8’s fast startup mode is that, while we don’t do a full “Plug & Play” enumeration of all drivers, we still do initialize drivers in this mode. Those of you who like to cold boot in order to “freshen up” drivers and devices will be glad to know that is still effective in this new mode, even if not an identical process to a cold boot.
And this point is worth mentioning regarding your Edit2 where shutdown+trunOn didn't fix your problem, but Restart did:
When to use Restart specifically: Of course, there are times where you may want to perform a complete shutdown – for example, if you’re opening the system to add or change some hardware. We have an option in the UI to revert back to the Windows 7 shutdown/cold boot behavior, or since that’s likely a fairly infrequent thing, you can use the new /full switch on shutdown.exe. From a cmd prompt, run: shutdown /s /full / t 0 to invoke an immediate full shutdown. Also, choosing Restart from the UI will do a full shutdown, followed by a cold boot.
More extended info, visit: Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8
Best Answer
I do not believe it is possible. As Moab pointed out in the comments, it used to be possible in Windows 9x.
That used to work by unloading Windows, going to the DOS environment, and reloading Windows again (if I recall correctly, one could simply type in
exitat the command prompt to get Windows to reload).Disclosure: I wrote ShutOff 2000, so I've been fiddling around with ways to shut down Windows since 1999. I don't claim to know all there is about it, though.