Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction - the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden ...
A modern PC is configured to attempt to boot from various devices in a certain order. If a computer is not booting from the device desired, such as the floppy drive, the user may have to enter the BIOS Setup function by pressing a special key when the computer is first turned on (such as Delete, F1, F2, F10 or F12), and then changing the boot order. [6]
Some Intel-based Macintosh computers have limitations when booting from USB devices – while the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) firmware can recognize and boot from USB drives, it can do this only in EFI mode. When the firmware switches to "legacy" BIOS mode, it no longer recognizes USB drives.
Early BIOS versions did not have passwords or boot-device selection options. The BIOS was hard-coded to boot from the first floppy drive, or, if that failed, the first hard disk. Access control in early AT-class machines was by a physical keylock switch (which was not hard to defeat if the computer case could be opened).
The mechanical details of how precisely these drivers are to be signed are not specified. [71] When Secure Boot is enabled, it is initially placed in "setup" mode, which allows a public key known as the "platform key" (PK) to be written to the firmware. Once the key is written, Secure Boot enters "User" mode, where only UEFI drivers and OS boot ...
The boot partition (or boot volume) [5] is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root or %systemroot% in Windows NT. [ 6 ] : 174 Before Windows 7 , the system and boot partitions were, by default, the same and were given the "C:" drive letter .
coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, [5] is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and run a modern 32-bit or 64-bit operating system.
Low Pin Count interface Winbond chip Trusted Platform Module installed on a motherboard, and using the LPC bus. The Low Pin Count (LPC) bus is a computer bus used on IBM-compatible personal computers to connect low-bandwidth devices to the CPU, such as the BIOS ROM (BIOS ROM was moved to the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) bus in 2006 [1]), "legacy" I/O devices (integrated into Super I/O ...