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I have two partitions on my mac: Mac OS X and Windows 7. I constantly switch between them so I started looking for a way to restart automatically into the other partition (without having to press Alt on restart). For Windows it is easy because the Boot Camp utilities provided by Apple has a quick menu for that. On Mac, though, I had to search and I found this code in Apple Script:

do shell script "bless --mount /Volumes/Windows/ --setBoot" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

The problem is this doesn't work. When it restarts after running this script it goes to the Mac partition, instead of Windows.

The good thing about AppleScript is that I can save it into an app and run if from the Dock, but so far it hasn't worked. Any ideas?

Chris Gerken
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Alex
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1 Answers1

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For the bless command you should use an -legacy option as well do the command would be

do shell script "bless --mount /Volumes/BOOTCAMP/ --setBoot --legacy" with administrator privileges

As you can see my windows partition is named BOOTCAMP, fill in the exact path to the mounted windows volume. If the volume isn't mounted bless command won't work either.

I wouldn't use the shutdown command from the command line. It won't give you the ability to save unsaved documents. Use system events instead

tell application "System Events" to shut down
dj bazzie wazzie
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  • Great! Solved my problem! Just out of curiosity, what does --legacy do? – Alex Feb 17 '12 at 16:37
  • With the legacy option turned on you can can boot a BIOS based system. That is what windows requires. – dj bazzie wazzie Feb 17 '12 at 17:01
  • When changing the boot partition from system preferences, no password is required. Isn't there another way to do this by script which would not need a password to be provided ? – Mat Feb 21 '12 at 23:30
  • First of all: Yes you are. The privileges are important and you need to have administrator privileges to change boot volume (look at the lock symbol at the bottom left). You can assign an administrator user to the do shell script. – dj bazzie wazzie Feb 22 '12 at 00:18