When on my Mac I want to boot into the Windows partition to play PC games, I have to restart, wait to hear the Apple boot tone,keep pressing Option until the hard disk icons appear and then select the Windows partition to boot from.
My Windows partition is installed on the 3rd Hard drive bay (the first two hard disks are used by the Mac Raid system) so I could not select the BOOTCAMP drive to startup from the Mac OS X "startup disk" preferences.
But I have found a way to do it with little script so I don't have to wait and press the option key to select the drive and so on…
If you want to learn how to create that script for your Mac, read on…
- First you must know on which device is your BOOTCAMP partition, so open a terminal and execute disktool -l to take a list of the drives attached to your Mac :
~$ disktool -l
***Disk Appeared ('disk5s2',Mountpoint = '/Volumes/WD 1TB', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'WD 1TB')
***Disk Appeared ('disk5s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk5',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk4s3',Mountpoint = '/Volumes/WD 2TB', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'WD 2TB')
***Disk Appeared ('disk4s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk4',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk3',Mountpoint = '/', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'MacPro')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s3',Mountpoint = '', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'Boot OSX')
***Disk Appeared ('disk1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk1s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk1s2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk1s3',Mountpoint = '', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'Boot OSX')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0s2',Mountpoint = '/Volumes/BOOTCAMP', fsType = 'ntfs-3g', volName = 'BOOTCAMP')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0s3',Mountpoint = '/Volumes/Time Machine', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'Time Machine')
In my system the disk0s2 has the BOOTCAMP (or WINDOWS partition) so I have to "bless" this device to boot on the next system reboot.
Using the AppleScript Editor write down (and correct the device and the password) and compile the following code and save as application. Now whenever you click on the newly created app the system will reboot in Windows, no need to keep the Option key down to select the icon.
do shell script "bless --device /dev/disk0s2 -setBoot -legacy -nextonly" password "xxxxxxx"
with administrator privileges
tell application "Finder" to restart
\
Cool. Works like a charm. "bless –you" 😉
My mac keyboard died and didn't want to read the "alt" key on a windows keyboard when it rebooted. This is so much better than holding down the key. Any known side-effects?
Macbook Pro & Mac Mini + Bootcamp user.
No side-effect at all. The system boots in Windows just like you where holding down the ALT key on startup.
Glad I've helped..!! Keep mac'ing'! 🙂