How To Abort The Mistaken Shutdown Operation In Windows

You’ve mistakenly pressed shutdown button on your pc or you mistakenly choose restart. In such condition, how to abort the current shutdown operation?

With a simple command it’s easy to abort the on going shutdown operation.

To abort shutdown, immediately after initiating shutdown, press Windows + R (Start>Run) and type the following command.

Shutdown –a

Note this command may not work if the shutdown operation have already closed the explorer.exe.

Further more typing opening run command and typing there may take time which may loose the chance to abort shutdown.

To not to make it happen, we’ll create an emergency abort shutdown icon. Then you’ll just have to double click on it to abort shutdown.

To create an emergency shutdown icon:

Let’s create a shortcut to shutdown –a command in desktop.

To do so, right click on the blank area of your desktop and choose New>Shortcut

In input box of “type the location of the item” copy or type the following command as shown in image below:

Give it your own shortcut name. (I named it Emergency)

Click on Finish button.

You’ll have your emergency abort shutdown icon ready. Now to easily recognize it, we’ll give it a unique icon and place it at the unique place (i.e. apart from other icons in desktop)

Right click on the Emergency icon that you just created, go to Properties and click on Change icon button at the bottom.

Then choose your unique icon and click OK.

Place it wherever you like, preferably apart from the common desktop icons(this may help you easily find the icon whenever you need it in hurry).

This will abort the shutdown.

Hope this tutorial was helpful.