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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.
Microsoft boot sectors, therefore, traditionally imposed certain restrictions on the boot process. For example, the boot file had to be located at a fixed position in the root directory of the file system and stored within consecutive sectors, [7] [8] conditions taken care of by the SYS command and slightly relaxed in later versions of DOS.
Filename extension is usually noted in parentheses if they differ from the file format's name or abbreviation. Many operating systems do not limit filenames to one extension shorter than 4 characters, as was common with some operating systems that supported the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system.
For Microsoft Windows, OS/2, and DOS, .exe is the filename extension that denotes a file as being executable – a computer program – containing an entry point. [ 1 ] In addition to being executable (adjective) such a file is often called an executable (noun) which is sometimes abbreviated as EXE.
For backwards-compatibility with MS-DOS and older Windows software, which recognizes filenames of a maximum of 11 characters in length with 8.3 format (i.e.: an eight-letter filename, a dot and a three-letter extension, such as autoexec.bat), files with LFNs get stored on disk in 8.3 format (longfilename.txt becoming longfi~1.txt), with the ...
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.