Windows 10: Create Shortcut to Boot to UEFI Firmware Settings in Windows 10

No, it does not work.

They definitely fail.

I tried your tutorial on a Lenovo X201. The tutorial shortcut gives no error (just a flash of command prompt) but shutdown /r /fw gives the error "Boot to firmware UI is not supported by this system's firmware.(1)"

It seems in fact this only works on EFI (it works fine on EFI systems for me certainly - I tested it).

You should change the title to exclude the word "BIOS" as it does not work.

I guess not many people use legacy any more but if it isn't clarified it would confuse for sure as it doesn't work for legacy BIOS PCs.

 

@sygnus21

All done. *Smile

How to Add Boot to UEFI Firmware Settings Context Menu in Windows 10

 

Tutorial and its title edited.

 

Thanks Shawn, works like a champ *Smile

@Kari, something I should have brought up is there is a delay of about 30 seconds (stop watched it the second time around) from when you click the shortcut to when the system restarts. At least on my system. In fact, the delay is so long I thought the shortcut didn’t work, and was about hit it again when the PC suddenly restarted. At any rate I timed it the second time around and that’s where I got the 30 seconds from.

Is this normal? If so, just want people aware of such a delay.

Thanks.

 

Yes, that is normal. The default timeout delay in shutdown command is 30 seconds. It will be used if no custom delay is set with /t X switch where X is preferred delay in seconds.

Some examples:

Shutdown in 30 seconds, using either default delay or setting delay manually to 30 seconds:

shutdown /s

shutdown /s /t 30

Restart in 30 seconds:

shutdown /r

shutdown /r /t 30

Restart to advanced startup options (/o switch) in 5 minutes (300 seconds) forcing all programs to close before restart (/f switch):

shutdown /r /o /f /t 300

Shutting down PC in one hour (3,600 seconds), forcing to close all programs, booting to UEFI settings next time PC is turned on:

shutdown /s /f /fw /t 3600

Restarting to UEFI settings immediately (no delay):

shutdown /r /fw /t 0

The last two sample commands above need to be run elevated because of the /fw switch. All other sample commands can be run without elevation.

 

Thanks. At least I now know this is normal behavior. And got it on the commands.

Thanks.

BTW I forgot to comment on this earlier. Nice one, I'll have to borrow it sometime....

 

Slightly off-topic but in my experience there is a significant difference between
/t 0
and
/t 1
(or any other number greater than zero).

You might think the only difference is one second, but my observation suggests that /t 0 does a "graceful" shutdown which waits for apps to close themselves, and allows you to cancel and go back and save unsaved files if the app doesn't close naturally.

Whereas /t 1 is more brutal - it just shuts everything down after 1 second and kills apps regardless.

At least that's what I have observed - not sure where this might be documented.

 

You are on the right track with that, David.

Again a not too well documented thing about shutdown command is the difference between time delay 0 seconds (/t 0, immediately) and time delay greater than 0 (/t X, where X is greater or equal than 1).

If delay 0 is used when there are applications open, Windows tells user that there are running applications letting user to decide if shutdown command should be performed anyway, closing all running apps discarding unsaved changes, or if user wants to cancel the shut down process.

Example: Notepad and Command Prompt open when running command shutdown /s /t 0:




Instead of just closing Notepad and Command prompt and shutting down, Windows checks what user wants to do:




However, if in exactly the same scenario we change the delay to 1 second (or more), shutdown command forcefully closes Notepad and Command Prompt after given delay and shuts down without any warnings about open applications.

Short: using delay 0 you can prevent accidentally shutting down when you have unsaved changes in any running application, whereas using delay 1 or greater all unsaved changes will be discarded and PC forced to shut down.

If you want to, you can use the /f (force) switch even with delay 0 to force Windows to close all apps discarding unsaved changes:

shutdown /s /f /t 0

Thanks Dude!