Quick Switch Startup Disk

By Dan Hinckley

6 responses. »

Automator_512.jpgIf you’re an Intel Mac user and run Boot Camp with Windows on your Apple Computer than you may be interested in being able to quickly restart your computer into the other OS on your system.

Of course, you can always use the long way, navigate to System Preferences, click Startup Disk, then select the Windows partition, click restart, and then restart again.

Or you can create a quick automator task that will let you restart into your Windows partition simply by running the script or launching the application you saved in automator.

To create a Quick Switch Startup Disk script or app add the following step to an Automator Workflow: Run Apple Script.

Remove any text in the Run Apple Script action and copy in the follow text:

do shell script “bless -mount /Volumes/yourWindowsVolume/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges
do shell script “shutdown -r now” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges

Untitled-1.png

Replace the text “yourWindowsVolume” with the volume name of your Windows partition and save the workflow as either a script menu plugin or an application.

From here, restarting into Windows is as easy as launching the app or selecting the script from Script Menu in the menu bar.

**Note: you can add the Script Menu to the Menu bar by:

  1. Open AppleScript Utility from your Applications folder
  2. Check “Show Script Menu in Menu Bar”
About Dan Hinckley
Dan Hinckley is an experienced Mac user who converted to Apple products when they introduced them on Intel Processors. He loves helping others get more out of their devices! Subscribe to Maciverse.com to get the latest from Dan and the Maciverse Team!! Find out more about Dan:

6 Responses so far.

  1. Best of Maciverse August 08

    November 12, 2008 at 10:01 am

    [...] Quick Reboot to Windows – Boot Camp users will be interested in this script that will help them quickly reboot into Windows XP or Vista. [...]

  2. z1ross

    May 22, 2009 at 4:52 am

    I'm trying ti and it no longer works for 10.5.7 :(

    • Dan

      May 31, 2009 at 3:18 am

      Not sure what error you're getting but it still works for me after 10.5.7

  3. Tejas Jayaraman

    February 10, 2010 at 10:55 am

    An improvement over this:

    This program requires you to hit “Run” and then input your password (if you have that option on).

    In automator, create an application:

    - Add Apple Script

    - Remove any lines that come default, and insert these.

    do shell script “bless -mount /Volumes/EDIT_ME/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly” password “EDIT_ME” with administrator privileges
    do shell script “shutdown -r now” with administrator privileges

    - Then click the Hammer icon and you should get it in the correct format.

    - Edit the fields EDIT_ME (ex: “BOOTCAMP”) to whatever the corresponding values are in your computer. If you do not require a password to change your system settings, then you do not need the (password “EDIT_ME”) line.

    - Save!

    If you double click the application you just created, you should go to windows directly.

    cheers!

    • Gag

      March 24, 2011 at 12:58 pm

      Nice!

  4. rudy

    October 16, 2011 at 8:03 am

    does not work,get error " no bootable device"
    any help please

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