Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The bootable virtual floppy disk can contain software that provides access to the optical medium in its native format. If an expansion ROM wishes to change the way the system boots (such as from a network device or a SCSI adapter) in a cooperative way, it can use the BIOS Boot Specification (BBS) API to register its ability to do so. Once the ...
BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction - the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden ...
32-bit Disk Access (also known as FastDisk) refers to a special disk access and caching mode available in older, MS-DOS-based Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was a set of protected mode device drivers that worked together to take advantage of advanced disk I/O features in the system BIOS.
Besides performing low-level disk access, INT 13h calls and related BIOS data structures also provide information about the types and capacities of disks (or other DASD devices) attached to the system; when a protected-mode OS boots, it may use that information from the BIOS to enumerate disk hardware so that it (the OS) can load and configure ...
On system with BIOS firmware, the BIOS invokes MBR boot code from a hard disk drive at startup. The MBR boot code and the VBR boot code are OS-specific. In Microsoft Windows, the MBR boot code tries to find an active partition (the MBR is only 512 bytes), then executes the VBR boot code of an active partition.
INT 10h is fairly slow, so many programs bypass this BIOS routine and access the display hardware directly. Setting the video mode, which is done infrequently, can be accomplished by using the BIOS, while drawing graphics on the screen in a game needs to be done quickly, so direct access to video RAM is more appropriate than making a BIOS call ...
BIOS-style booting from MBR-partitioned disks is commonly called BIOS-MBR, regardless of it being performed on UEFI or legacy BIOS-based systems. Furthermore, booting legacy BIOS-based systems from GPT disks is also possible, and such a boot scheme is commonly called BIOS-GPT.
When a user is logging on to Windows, the startup sound is played, the shell (usually EXPLORER.EXE) is loaded from the [boot] section of the SYSTEM.INI file, and startup items are loaded. In all versions of Windows 9x except ME, it is also possible to load Windows by booting to a DOS prompt and typing "win".