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The boot sector or UEFI loads the Windows Boot Manager (a file named BOOTMGR on either the system or the boot partition), accesses the Boot Configuration Data store and uses the information to load the operating system through winload.exe or winresume.exe on BIOS systems, and winload.efi and winresume.efi on UEFI systems. [2]
An additional important file is boot.ini, which contains boot configuration (if missing, NTLDR will default to \Windows on the first partition of the first hard drive). NTLDR is launched by the volume boot record of system partition, which is typically written to the disk by the Windows FORMAT or SYS command.
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.
Second-stage boot loaders, such as GNU GRUB, rEFInd, BOOTMGR, Syslinux, and NTLDR, are not themselves operating systems, but are able to load an operating system properly and transfer execution to it; the operating system subsequently initializes itself and may load extra device drivers.
EasyBCD has a number of bootloader-related features that can be used to repair and configure the bootloader. From the "Manage Bootloader" section of EasyBCD, it is possible to switch between the BOOTMGR bootloader (used since Windows Vista) and the NTLDR bootloader (used by legacy versions of Windows, from Windows NT to Windows XP) in the MBR from within Windows by simply clicking a button.
The VBR is often OS-specific; however, its main function is to load and execute the operating system boot loader file (such as bootmgr or ntldr), which is the second-stage boot loader, from an active partition. Then the boot loader loads the OS kernel from the storage device.
Setup begins to expand Windows files using a WIM image (aka install.wim). If the user has picked to upgrade from a current install of Windows (e.g. Windows 7 to 10), the files and applications will be transferred. If booting from the installation disk, the bootloader is installed (in the case of Windows Vista and above, this would be BOOTMGR).
Rarely an experienced user would reinstall Windows. In the case of the former, the boot loader will most likely inform the user the name of the missing file, allowing for the user to supply and/or reinstall the missing files to resolve the boot problem. In the case of the latter, however, the computer will not be able to boot, even into safe mode.