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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.
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]
[3] When booting, the loader portion of NTLDR does the following in order: Accesses the file system on the boot drive (either FAT or New Technology File System, NTFS). If Windows was put in the hibernation state, the contents of hiberfil.sys are loaded into memory and the system resumes where it left off.
A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader [1] [2] or called bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer and booting an operating system. If it also provides an interactive menu with multiple boot choices then it's often called a boot manager .
On Apple Mac computers using Intel x86-64 processor architecture, the EFI system partition is initially left blank and unused for booting into macOS. [13] [14]However, the EFI system partition is used as a staging area for firmware updates [15] and for the Microsoft Windows bootloader for Mac computers configured to boot into a Windows partition using Boot Camp.
Multi-booting allows more than one operating system to reside on one computer; for example, if a user has a primary operating system that they use most frequently and an alternate operating system that they use less frequently.
Typical POST screen (AMI BIOS) Typical UEFI-compliant BIOS POST screen (Phoenix Technologies BIOS) Summary screen after POST and before booting an operating system (AMI BIOS) A power-on self-test ( POST ) is a process performed by firmware or software routines immediately after a computer or other digital electronic device is powered on.
When debugging a concurrent and distributed system of systems, a bootloop (also written boot loop or boot-loop) is a diagnostic condition of an erroneous state that occurs on computing devices; when those devices repeatedly fail to complete the booting process and restart before a boot sequence is finished, a restart might prevent a user from ...