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I have a Mac with Ubuntu, OSX and Windows (booting with rEFIt). I need a way to select which OS to boot on the next reboot. I can do that from within OSX and Windows (through Bootcamp) but I also need a way to tell my machine to boot OSX on the next reboot.

I can't hold ALT on boot to select the OS in the visual EFI screen, because my video card doesn't support that (upgraded my Mac).

PS: I tried efibootmgr but that doesn't show me the actual EFI boot options, only the options available in Grub (e.g. rEFIt does not appear as an option).

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Reset to default
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You are wrong, efibootmgr does not show grub entries only. List what's in nvram of your machine with

sudo efibootmgr -v

and then use the

sudo efibootmgr  -n xxxx

to select the next boot item.

If you have a bootloader not listed in the nvram list, then it is probably in the device default location, e.g. /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi. In that case, you can make an nvram entry, and then refer to that entry with the bootnext flag.

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  • None of the entries actually worked, except for the ubuntu/grub entry. I had four entries, "ubuntu, Mac OS X, Mac OS X, ''". The last entry was unnamed with a HEX value of FFFF. None of the entries except the Ubuntu one would load with bootnext. Windows can't be booted through EFI on my model (works on later models), the Mac bootloader seems to be injected somewhere else. I solved my problem by installing rEFInd (the rEFIt fork), setting it as a default with efibootmgr and use the refind-config to manage what to boot.
    – mniess
    Jun 5, 2016 at 22:36
  • So there's no good solution for my actual problem. Regarding my question, though, your answer is the right one.
    – mniess
    Jun 5, 2016 at 22:36
  • Using the -n options you set just the next boot. To change permanently the boot order use the -o option with a list of boot partitions.
    – karlacio
    Jul 21, 2022 at 17:38

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