Holy Crap My Hair Is On Fire

Reboot a Windows PC Remotely.

by TheRealEdwin on 29/04/10 at 11:43 pm

Image by Sushovan. (CC)

Here is an interesting problem I ran into today. Even a week after McAfee destroyed almost 700 of our workstations, I was cleaning up the mess. So here is the situation. I was remotely connected to a site in the middle of nowhere Ohio with a connection so slow it takes minutes to do things in seconds normally. Normally I would remotely control this XP workstation using RDP and reboot it. But in this case, it was just faster to use the keyboard to reboot the workstation remotely to save time. But I didn’t know how to do so remotely. I know how to reboot a machine while I am on it, but not remotely. So how do you do it?

Normally the command is as follows.

shutdown /r /t 00

The /r tells the command this is a reboot and the /t tells the PC how long to wait for the reboot. I’m impatient so I always use 00 for instant reboots. The trick for the remote reboot of another Windows PC is the /m trigger. After that, you just tell the command which PC by name you want to reboot and boom, done. Here is an example.

shutdown /r /t 00 /m \\DT02

Do you have any neat shutdown tricks? Post your thought and tips in the comments.