Custom_Entries.md

Adding a Windows entry to the OpenCore boot menu

This guide is for adding an entry for booting Windows to the OpenCore boot menu, so you don't have to use 0 as ScanPolicy. Instead, you can use 2687747 for example (or generate your own), which excludes a lot of file systems and interfaces from scanning.

Prerequisites

In order to add the Windows Boot Manager to OpenCore's boot menu, we need to find the location of the EFI Partition with the "Microsoft" folder that contains the Windows Bootloader. If you only use one HDD, it's located inside the same EFI folder as your OpenCore files. But on systems which have Windows on a separate disk, we need to find out its PCI path first via the Open Shell command line tool before we can add the path to the config.plist.

Finding the PCI path of the Windows Bootloader using OpenShell

• Add OpenShell.efi to EFI/OC/Tools folder and config.plist.
• Reboot the system.
• From the OC boot menu, select OpenShell.efi (if it's configured as an Auxiliary tool, hit space bar to show it)
• Once Open Shell is running, we need to find the EFI partition containing the "Microsoft" folder:
  • Type ls fs1:EFI and hit Enter.
  • If it returns ls: File not Found - 'fs1', continue searching.
  • Enter ls fs2:EFI, ls fs3:EFI, etc., until you find it. In my case it is located in ls fs8:EFI:
    
  • Enter fsX: (X = number of the EFI file system where the "Microsoft" folder is located – in my case fs8:).
  • Type map > map.txt and hit Enter → saves a list of the PCI devices as a text file on the selected EFI Partition of the Windows Disk.
  • Type exit and hit Enter. You will return to the boot picker.
• Boot back into macOS.

Adding the PCI path to the Windows Boot Manager

Once you're back in macOS, do the following:

• Mount the EFI Partition of the Windows Disk.
• Copy the map.txt file located in the root folder of the EFI partition to your Desktop.
• Unmount the EFI partition
• Mount your regular EFI partition which has includes your OpenCore files.
• Open the config.plist with OCAT or a Plist Editor.
• Go to Misc\Entries and create a new entry:
  
• Now, open the map.txt file and search for fsX (X = number of fs which contains the Microsoft Bootloader found using Open Shell; in my case fs8):
  
• Copy the PCI Path and paste to a text editor because we need to modify it.
• Append the following line to the PCI path: /\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
• The final path should have this form: YOUR_PciRoot_Path/\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
• Back in OCAT, copy the whole path into the Path field. The complete entry should look something like this:
  
• Change the ScanPolicy to your liking. I use 2687747.
• Save your config and reboot. The Windows Entry should now be present in the OC boot menu:
  

Important

• Remember that the PCI root path to the Microsoft Boot Manager may change if you format the HDD containing the Windows installation!
• Revert ScanPolicy to 0 if other drives are missing from the Boot Picker GUI.
• If macOS partitions are not shown in the Boot Picker GUI, change MinDate and MinVersion to -1 for macOS versions older than macOS 11.

Notes for using QWERTZ keyboard layouts with "umlauts"

If you run shell on a (german) "QWERTZ" keyboard, some keys are different:

US Layout	DE Layout
:	SHIFT+Ö
>	SHIFT+.
\	#
-	ß
y	z

Further Resources

• OpenCore UEFI Shell for Hackintosh troubleshooting - a beginners guide