Is there an attention-free way to reboot from MacOS into Bootcamp/Windows?
The standard way to reboot from MacOS into a Bootcamp Windows partition is to restart, hold Option, then manually select the Windows partition. Is there a single Terminal command or menubar application that can do this as well? I'm looking for some kind of single action I can fire off to handle the entire booting-into-Windows scheme.
With System Integrity Protection enabled, this is difficult to accomplish. However, this is not impossible. For example, you can install a third party Boot Manager such as rEFInd. You can then install scripts which can configure rEFInd to instruct the firmware to boot Windows after restarting the Mac.
Note: I do not know how the new T2 Security Chip will restrict the capabilities of rEFInd.
The idea is simple. The process takes place in the following steps.
- rEFInd is installed on the Mac in either an EFI, FAT32 or ExFAT partition.
- The rEFInd is set to be the default for the firmware to boot.
- The rEFInd plain text configuration files are setup to instruct the firmware to boot macOS.
- The BASH script command or AppleScript application is installed in macOS.
- When this script or application executes, the rEFInd configuration files are modified so Windows will be booted instead of macOS.
- You can either restart the Mac or have the script or application do so.