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The term boot comes from the idea of lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps: [5] the computer contains a tiny program (bootstrap loader) which will load and run a program found on a boot device. This program may itself be a small program designed to load a larger and more capable program, i.e., the full operating system.
Despite Microsoft's radically different definition (see below), System Information, a utility app included in Windows NT family of operating systems, refers to it as "boot device". [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The system partition is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root .
A bootable MBR device is defined as one that can be read from, and where the last two bytes of the first sector contain the little-endian word AA55h, [nb 6] found as byte sequence 55h, AAh on disk (also known as the MBR boot signature), or where it is otherwise established that the code inside the sector is executable on x86 PCs.
GRUB 2, elilo and systemd-boot serve as conventional, full-fledged standalone UEFI boot managers (a.k.a. bootloader managers) for Linux. Once loaded by a UEFI firmware, they can access and boot kernel images from all devices, partitions and file systems they support, without being limited to the EFI system partition.
When a bootable device is found, the BIOS transfers control to the loaded sector. The BIOS does not interpret the contents of the boot sector other than to possibly check for the boot sector signature in the last two bytes. Interpretation of data structures like partition tables and BIOS Parameter Blocks is done by the boot program in the boot ...
The boot loader is responsible for accessing the file system on the boot drive, starting ntoskrnl.exe, and loading boot-time device drivers into memory. Once all the boot and system drivers have been loaded, the kernel starts the session manager (smss.exe), which begins the login process.
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A volume boot record (VBR) is the first sector of a data storage device that has not been partitioned, or the first sector of an individual partition on a data storage device that has been partitioned. It may contain code to load an operating system (or other standalone program) installed on that device or within that partition.