Monday, October 22, 2012

Text bootloader in Windows 8

Windows 8 installs a new, quite nice looking, graphical bootloader. Unfortunately, this bling comes with a fairly serious drawback - Windows 8 needs to boot before the bootloader is displayed on the screen, which can take 20 seconds or so, and then if you have the audacity to want to boot into another operating system, the machine will be rebooted, forcing you to endure another BIOS POST sequence.

The workaround is to enable the text based bootloader using bcdedit (note that the backticks (`) are required in PowerShell to escape the braces):
bcdedit /set `{current`} bootmenupolicy legacy
To switch back to the graphical bootloader, run the following command:
bcdedit /set `{current`} bootmenupolicy standard
You'll need to run these PowerShell commands as an administrator.

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