ellwoodje01: Set Boot Camp partition to boot to Windows via command line

Friday, 3 June 2011

Set Boot Camp partition to boot to Windows via command line

I work in academia in a large 1:1 deployment of around 6,000 MacBooks. At one point in time when we made the switch to Macs an assessment testing software developer had not made a universal binary app yet and their PPC app just would not run right on Intel based Macs. So, I had to create and deploy a dual boot image for them. The thought had crossed my mind on how to allow managed users (with no admin rights) the ability to dual boot? I cannot use any boot loader that runs in EFI either because I have to have firmware passwords on the Macs via security protocols.

So, I dug around in Terminal and was messing around with the bless command. If you execute this command:

/usr/sbin/bless --device /dev/disk0s3 --setBoot --legacy --nextonly

It will set the partition that lives on /dev/disk0s3 to boot for next restart only, and the -legacy option supports booting an OS that does not support EFI boot loaders. Since Windows st ...