Reboot directly to Windows from Linux, skipping UEFI boot manager

winyeet

A quick little post!

I use Linux 90% of the time. Arch btw. However, due to an incompatibility between the NVIDIA Linux driver and my VR headset 🔗, I find myself rebooting into Windows often. Rebooting takes a bit of time because DDR5 (well, several seconds more than I prefer), and I often take the time to use prepare to enter VR, use the bathroom, make tea, etc. If I miss the boot manager’s timer to switch to a different OS, though, I end up right where I started and need to reboot again to get to Windows.

In comes efibootmgr!

#!/usr/bin/env bash

boot_num=$(efibootmgr | grep -Po '^Boot\K\d+(?=\* Windows Boot Manager)')
sudo efibootmgr -n $boot_num
sudo reboot

With a bonus sudo ln -s winyeet.sh /usr/local/bin/winyeet (or really I should finally get around to making a folder full of random scripts added to PATH), I can quickly reboot into Windows completely unattended!

Also a quick note that the above grep regex requires a grep supporting PCRE. Otherwise, one will need a different implementation.