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

If we have two OS working on a computer and most of times we want to switch through both OS like if we have Vista and XP. So when we try to switch, we have to reboot and then select from the boot menu which is very lazy and annoying step. We can solve this annoyance by making two shortcuts by batching some files and command line magic so that we can just simply click to “Reboot Into XP” or “Reboot into Vista”, and be done with it.

In Vista first we’ll try to create the Shortcut to Reboot into XP and we’ll need to create a simple batch file 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 sets the XP partition as a one-time boot default, and then the second line calls the shutdown command with the reboot option. So we’ll save the batch file into a folder, making sure to name the file with the .bat extension and choose All Files in the “Save as type” drop-down.

Now we’ll create a shortcut to this file and most importantly we’ll have to change the properties of the shortcut to Always Run in Administrator mode. We can change the icon image if we want to and our shortcut is ready.

Now we are going to create the XP Shortcut to Reboot into Vista, and the first thing we need to do is figure out which drive letter has Windows Vista on it when we are in XP.  We’ll need to know this so we can run the same bcdedit command that we did in the first step. Just run it from the command prompt without any arguments like this:

D:WindowsSystem32bcdedit

If we right-click and choose Mark in the command prompt, we can select it and copy to the clipboard by using the Enter key. We’ll need it for the next command. Open up notepad to create a new batch file just like we did before, and paste in the following, replacing COPIEDID with the text that you copied from the command prompt above, and making sure to replace D: with your drive letter if it’s different.

D:WindowsSystem32bcdedit /bootsequence COPIEDID /addfirst
shutdown /r /t 0

Now save the batch file, making sure to choose a .bat extension and choose All Files under “Save as type”.
This batch file will immediately reboot us back into Vista.