Editing Windows 7 Boot Menu Entries

by Tom Steup.
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If you’re not exactly thrilled with the way Windows 7 has prepared your boot menu options for you, you can change them. As if the rather plain entries aren’t enough, you can easily get confused if you have multiple instances of Windows 7 installed on your computer in a multiboot scenario. To change boot menu entries in Windows 7, simply follow these steps:

1. Boot into the first Windows 7 instance whose boot menu entry you wish to change.

2. Open a command prompt by typing cmd into the Start menu Search box. Your current account needs Administrative permissions to perform this task.

3. At the command prompt, enter the command bcdedit

4. You can see the name for the Windows 7 boot menu entry.

5. To change the boot menu entry displayed for this installation of Windows 7, enter the following Command: bcdedit /set description “New boot menu text”.

6. To continue renaming other Windows 7 installations on the computer, simply reboot into each installation and repeat steps 2–4.

Be aware that you cannot edit any other boot menu entries for any other OSs using the bcdedit command. The boot menu entries for older versions of Windows that you have installed on the computer, as well as those for other OSs (such as versions of Linux), are still managed through the Windows XP or Windows 2000 boot.ini file. When you select the Earlier Versions of Windows option on the Windows 7 boot menu, you get another boot menu displayed using the information in the boot.ini file to help you select and launch any of those other OSs installed on your computer.

One more thing: bcdedit isn’t exactly user-friendly; not surprisingly, people have built better tools for editing Windows 7’s boot configuration data. We’ve used and like VistaBootPro, available at www.vistabootpro.org. NeoSmart Technologies EasyBCD is also a winner, available at www.neosmart.net (scroll down and look for the “Recent Software Releases” heading on their home page).

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