A method and system for recovery of a computing environment includes monitoring during a pre-boot phase and a runtime phase of a computing device for selection of a hot key sequence by a user and performing a recovery action in response to the selection of the hot key sequence by the user. The recovery action may be any one of a number of predetermined and/or selectable actions such as restoring system defaults, migrating memory, displaying a menu of options, setting various software flags, restarting or rebooting the computing device, and/or the like.