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A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading from a hard disk drive.
Current optical drives use either a tray-loading mechanism, where the disc is loaded onto a motorized tray (as utilized by half-height, "desktop" drives), a manually operated tray (as utilized in laptop computers, also called slim type), or a slot-loading mechanism, where the disc is slid into a slot and drawn in by motorized rollers. Slot ...
A disk operating system (DOS) is a computer operating system that resides on and can use a disk storage device, such as a floppy disk, hard disk drive, or optical disc.A disk operating system provides a file system for organizing, reading, and writing files on the storage disk, and a means for loading and running programs stored on that disk.
memory-mapping the executable object from the disk into main memory; copying the command-line arguments into virtual memory; initializing registers (e.g., the stack pointer); jumping to the program entry point (_start). In Microsoft Windows 7 and above, the loader is the LdrInitializeThunk function contained in ntdll.dll, which does the following:
A boot sector is the sector of a persistent data storage device (e.g., hard disk, floppy disk, optical disc, etc.) which contains machine code to be loaded into random-access memory (RAM) and then executed by a computer system's built-in firmware (e.g., the BIOS).
A boot disk is a removable digital data storage medium from which a computer can load and run an operating system or utility program. [1] The computer must have a built-in program which will load and execute a program from a boot disk meeting certain standards.
From the perspective of the BIOS, the action of the MBR loading a volume boot record into RAM is exactly the same as the action of a floppy disk volume boot record loading the object code of an operating system loader into RAM. In either case, the program that the BIOS loaded is going about the work of chain loading an operating system.
Disk storage is now used in both computer storage and consumer electronic storage, e.g., audio CDs and video discs (VCD, DVD and Blu-ray). Data on modern disks is stored in fixed length blocks, usually called sectors and varying in length from a few hundred to many thousands of bytes.