How to rename the OS in Windows 10 boot menu

With Windows 8, Microsoft made changes to the boot experience. The simple text-based boot loader is now disabled by default and in its place, there is a touch friendly graphical user interface with icons and text. Windows 10 has this as well.

In a dual boot configuration, it shows the operating system names. If you need to rename this OS entry in a dual boot configuration, it is not made easier by Microsoft. Let's see how it should be done.

There is a console utility, bcdedit.exe, which is bundled with Windows 10 by default. It is intended to manage all the options of the modern boot loader. It should be used to rename the operating system name that you see in the list at startup.
Follow these steps to rename the OS entry:

1. Open an elevated command prompt instance.
2. Type or copy-paste the following:

   bcdedit

   This will list all your operating systems which are shown in the Windows 10 boot menu:
   
   There, note/copy the "identifier" GUID value of the item which you want to rename. For example, let's rename my "Windows 10 Safe Mode" item. Its identifier is "{8068e97e-8512-11e5-a9dd-f9b1246c66fc}".

3. Next, type the following command:

   bcdedit /set {guid} description "New name"

   Replace {guid} with the identifier you copied in the command above. The "New name" is the desired name which you want to see in the boot menu. Let's say, I want to rename my "Windows 10 Safe Mode" item to "Windows 10 Safe Mode (Minimal)". The command will be as follows:

   bcdedit /set {8068e97e-8512-11e5-a9dd-f9b1246c66fc} description "Windows 10 Safe Mode (Minimal)"

   See the following screenshot:

4. To verify your changes, you can run bcdedit without parameters once again or reboot Windows 10 to see the boot menu in action. Your changes will be applied:

Tip: Winaero Tweaker allows you to manage the secret hidden parameters of the Windows 10 bootloader, which are not listed bcdedit's help:

It allows you to:

• enable advanced options of the boot menu - such as safe mode, debugging and so on.
• enable editing of the boot options - this allows you to specify addition parameters for the kernel. They are similar to the older boot.ini kernel switches;
• disable the blue Windows logo during boot;
• disable the spinning circle during boot;
• disable text messages during boot - messages like "Please wait", "Updating registry – 10%" and so on;
• disable the modern graphical boot UI and turn it into the text-based boot loader;
• enable or disable verbose sign in messages.

Get Winaero Tweaker here: Download Winaero Tweaker.

That's it.

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