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When a user is logging on to Windows, the startup sound is played, the shell (usually EXPLORER.EXE) is loaded from the [boot] section of the SYSTEM.INI file, and startup items are loaded. In all versions of Windows 9x except ME, it is also possible to load Windows by booting to a DOS prompt and typing "win".
The system partition is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root. By default, in Linux, operating system files are mounted at / (the root directory). In Linux, a single partition can be both a boot and a system partition if both /boot/ and the root directory are in the same partition.
The active partition is the partition where the boot flag is set. DOS and Windows allow only one boot partition to be set with the boot flag. [4] Other boot loaders used by third-party boot managers (such as GRUB or XOSL) can be installed to a master boot record and can boot primary or extended partitions, which do not have the boot flag set ...
UEFI support in Windows began in 2008 with Windows Vista SP1. [22] The Windows boot manager is located at the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ subfolder of the EFI system partition. [23] On Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and later, access to the EFI system partition is obtained by running the mountvol command. Mounts the EFI system partition on the specified drive.
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]
All Windows operating systems from Windows 95 onwards can be located on (almost) any partition, but the boot files (io.sys, bootmgr, ntldr, etc.) must reside on a primary partition. However, other factors, such as a PC's BIOS (see Boot sequence on standard PC ) may also impose specific requirements as to which partition must contain the primary OS.
In Microsoft Windows, the MBR boot code tries to find an active partition (the MBR is only 512 bytes), then executes the VBR boot code of an active partition. The VBR boot code tries to find and execute the bootmgr file from an active partition. [3] On systems with UEFI firmware, UEFI invokes bootmgfw.efi from an EFI system partition at startup ...
The conventional MBR code checks the MBR's partition table for a partition set as bootable [nb 6] (the one with active flag set). If an active partition is found, the MBR code loads the boot sector code from that partition, known as Volume Boot Record (VBR), and executes it. The MBR boot code is often operating-system specific.