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The first stage of PC boot loaders (FSBL, first-stage boot loader) located on fixed disks and removable drives must fit into the first 446 bytes of the master boot record in order to leave room for the default 64-byte partition table with four partition entries and the two-byte boot signature, which the BIOS requires for a proper boot loader ...
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]
For example, Das U-Boot may be split into two stages: the platform would load a small SPL (Secondary Program Loader), which is a stripped-down version of U-Boot, and the SPL would do some initial hardware configuration (e.g. DRAM initialization using CPU cache as RAM) and load the larger, fully featured version of U-Boot. [74]
For NT and NT-based operating systems, it also allows the user to pass preconfigured options to the kernel. The menu options are stored in boot.ini, which itself is located in the root of the same disk as NTLDR. Though NTLDR can boot DOS and non-NT versions of Windows, boot.ini cannot configure their boot options.
The processor executes the SMM code in a separate address space (SMRAM) that has to be made inaccessible to other operating modes of the CPU by the firmware. [7] System Management Mode can address up to 4 GB memory as huge real mode. In x86-64 processors, SMM can address >4 GB memory as real address mode. [8]
Once all the boot and system drivers have been loaded, the kernel starts the session manager (smss.exe), which begins the login process. After the user has successfully logged into the machine, winlogon applies User and Computer Group Policy setting and runs startup programs declared in the Windows Registry and in "Startup" folders.
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.
An initramfs-style boot is similar, but not identical to the described initrd boot. At this point, with interrupts enabled, the scheduler can take control of the overall management of the system, to provide pre-emptive multi-tasking, and the init process is left to continue booting the user environment in user space.