Thread: Create Shortcuts to Quickly Reboot to the Alternate OS in a Vista/XP Dual-Boot

If you have a dual boot system and often switch back and forth from Vista to XP, you may already annoyed by the fact that you must wait until the boot menu and will select the right operating system and half the time you step away and The start ends in the wrong anyway.

With various simple batch files and command line magic, we can create two shortcuts so you can just click to “Reboot Into XP” or “Restart into Vista”, and be done with it.

Create the Shortcut to Reboot into XP

To make the shortcut we will require making a simple batch file, which we can accomplish by opening up notepad and then pasting in the following text:

bcdedit /bootsequence {ntldr} /addfirst Shutdown /r /t 0

The first line runs the bcdedit tool and set the XP partition as a one-time boat standard, and then the second line calls the shutdown command with the restart option.

Once you are complete, save the batch file into a folder, making confident to name the file with the .bat extension and select All Files in the “Save as type” drop-down.



Now you will desire to make a shortcut to the batch file in a location that is simple to access, and give it a useful name. Open up the shortcut properties and click the Advanced button, then select Run as administrator.



You can also use the shortcut icon if you want a nice, or not. Anyway, you now contain a shortcut that you boot in XP by clicking and clicking through the UAC prompt if UAC turned on you.



For further credit you can also make a shortcut that does not prompt for UAC, but it gets a few additional steps to make.

Create the XP Shortcut to Reboot into Vista

The next part of the tutorial needs you to be in Windows XP because we are going to make the shortcuts that restart you support into Vista.

The first thing you require to do is find out which drive letter has Windows Vista on it when you are in XP. here shown, Vista is located on the E: drive:

We will need to know, so we share bcdedit command that we did in the first step can be performed. Only run it from the command prompt without any arguments:

E:\Windows\System32\bcdedit

You should get a look at the output something similar to the highlighted portion below, which is the unique ID of your Vista partition as regards bcdedit.

If you right click and select Mark the command prompt, you can choose and to the clipboard using the Enter key. We will demand that the next command.

Open a new notepad batch file just like we did before, and paste in the following, swapping IDGOESHERE with the text that you copied from the exceeding command prompt, and make confident to E: replaced by your drive letter and it different.



For example, my command looks more like this:
E:\Windows\System32\bcdedit /bootsequence {005f3343-44da-11dd-82b2-9c50424120af} /addfirst
shutdown /r /t 0

Now save the batch file, making confident to select a .bat extension and select All Files under “Save as type”.



This batch file will instantly restart you back into Vista.

Speed Up the Reboot Process

One of the first things you have maybe observed if you restart all the time is that waiting 30 seconds for the default Operating System is a waste of time.

Open up Control Panel \ System and click on the “Advanced system settings” link on the left-hand corner.

Then click on the Settings button under the “Startup and Recovery” section.



You can change the default of 30 seconds to something far less. Usually select 3 seconds, but you can use whatever amount you want. not suggesting that much less, because it will be very difficult to manually or otherwise choose.



Even Quicker Reboots

You can speed up the restart process even more by setting up Vista and XP to automatically login. Of course, you must only perform this on a personal desktop at home, we would not suggest automatic login on a laptop or work PC.