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The boot ROM is either placed on the same die as the CPU or is an external ROM chip. On modern systems, the boot ROM (whether integrated into CPU or external ROM chip) is usually use NOR flash which supports execute in place. The boot ROM will then initialize the hardware busses and peripherals needed to boot.
The computer first executes a relatively small program stored in the boot ROM, which is read-only memory (ROM, and later EEPROM, NOR flash) along with some needed data, to initialize hardware devices such as CPU, motherboard, memory, storage and other I/O devices, to access the nonvolatile device (usually block device, e.g., NAND flash) or ...
The first program loaded into RAM is called a first-stage boot loader, and the program it loads is called a second-stage boot loader. On many embedded CPUs, the CPU built-in boot ROM, sometimes called the zero-stage boot loader, [50] can find and load first-stage boot loaders.
In Windows NT, the booting process is initiated by NTLDR in versions before Vista and the Windows Boot Manager (BOOTMGR) in Vista and later. [4] 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.
The reset vector is a pointer or address, where the CPU should always begin as soon as it is able to execute instructions. The address is in a section of non-volatile memory (such as BIOS or Boot ROM) initialized to contain instructions to start the operation of the CPU, as the first step in the process of booting the system containing the CPU.
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.
In x86 systems, typically the First Stage Boot Loader is an XIP program that is linked to run at the address at which the flash chip(s) are mapped at power-up and contains a minimal program to set up the system RAM (which depends on the components used on the individual boards and cannot be generalized enough so that the proper sequence could ...
Some virtual machine infrastructure can directly import and export a boot image for direct installation to "bare metal", i.e. a disk. This is the standard technique for OEMs to install identical copies of an operating system on many identical machines: The boot image is created as a virtual machine and then exported, or created on one disk and then copied via a boot image control ...