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How do I make boot menu appear without pressing f11 every time? I switch between operating systems like few times a day, which makes it annoying having to press it all the time. I have a MSI motherboard, I tried searching something like 'Always show boot menu', but no success.

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  • so is it impossible to do this the way I want? to have the boot menu appear automatically?
    – Tomek Nowak
    Commented Dec 11, 2021 at 20:34
  • Dual Boot requires complete restarts, so no it would not be possible
    – anon
    Commented Dec 11, 2021 at 20:35
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    If it's UEFI you can consider rEFInd tool. rodsbooks.com/refind You may need to disable Secure Boot though.
    – patkim
    Commented Dec 11, 2021 at 21:18
  • @Tomek - I made the point in my answer that constant restarts from dual boot could waste quite a bit of valuable time. Automating the switch over (if it succeeds) will not change that,
    – anon
    Commented Dec 11, 2021 at 21:51
  • With UEFI you can press Shift when activating any of the Windows reboot buttons. From the menu that appears, you can select the next boot item. Dunno about any other OSes you’re using though. // I think rEFInd might actually be a good choice.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Dec 11, 2021 at 23:11

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Run the Command Prompt (CMD) as Administrator and enter the following commands:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu yes
shutdown /r

The Windows Boot Menu should be displayed after the reboot.

For easy use, you may create a .bat file that contains these commands, set a desktop shortcut to point to it, and set its Properties to run in Administrator mode. To execute it, just double-click the desktop icon.

If the Windows Boot Menu does not contain all the Windows instances (for example for EFI), a possible solution is to add the other instances to the Windows Boot Menus of all Windows instances.

See the Microsoft article Adding Boot Entries.

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  • I think OP is referring to the firmware’s boot selection menu, not the Windows Boot Manager menu.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Dec 11, 2021 at 23:07
  • @DanielB: Windows can boot into BIOS/UEFI by shutdown /r /fw, but not into the Boot Menu. A possible solution is to add the other instances to the Windows Boot menu: Adding Boot Entries. I added this to my answer.
    – harrymc
    Commented Dec 12, 2021 at 9:24
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If you're dual booting Windows and Linux, the preferred solution seems to be to use the GRUB bootloader with an indefinite timeout, instead of the motherboard's BIOS boot menu.

GRUB will give you the option to boot the Linux system it's from, or any other operating system it can find. And GRUB can be configured to wait forever.

See:

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  • Before anyone tries to fix the grammar, yes, "GRUB bootloader" is a bit like "ATM Machine", but I think we want search result hits more than excessively correct grammar
    – mendota
    Commented Oct 25, 2022 at 20:52
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I know it had been some time since the original post. But, I have an MSI gaming pc. To get it to boot to the GRUB bootloader:

  1. Go into BIOS.
  2. Click on settings.
  3. Click on boot.
  4. Click on UEFI Hard Disk Drive BBS Priorities.
  5. Switch Kali to number 1 and Windows to number 2.
  6. Save and restart.

After I did that my computer boots up to the GRUB loader every time.

I had to hunt and not find the answer. So if anyone in the future is hunting for the solution for an MSI computer, this worked for me. Hopefully it will work for them also.

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