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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's UEFI or BIOS firmware supports booting from various devices, typically a local solid-state drive or hard disk drive via the GPT or Master Boot Record (MBR) on such a drive or disk, an optical disc drive (using El Torito), a USB mass storage device (USB flash drive, memory card reader, USB hard disk drive, USB optical disc drive ...
WinUSB is a generic USB driver provided by Microsoft, for their operating systems starting with Windows Vista but which is also available for Windows XP. It is aimed at simple devices that are accessed by only one application at a time (for example instruments like weather stations, devices that only need a diagnostic connection or for firmware upgrades).
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. The VBR boot code tries to find and execute the bootmgr file from an active partition. [3] On systems with UEFI firmware, UEFI invokes bootmgfw.efi from an EFI system partition at startup ...
Rufus was originally designed [5] as a modern open source replacement for the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool for Windows, [6] which was primarily used to create DOS bootable USB flash drives. The first official release of Rufus, version 1.0.3 (earlier versions were internal/alpha only [ 7 ] ), was released on December 4, 2011, with originally ...
In these cases a computer can often be "redirected" to boot from a USB device through use of an initial bootable CD or floppy disk. [5] [6] [7] Some Intel-based Macintosh computers have limitations when booting from USB devices – while the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) firmware can recognize and boot from USB drives, it can do this only ...
In Windows, if Secure Boot is enabled, all kernel drivers must be digitally signed; non-WHQL drivers may be refused to load. In February 2013, another Red Hat developer attempted to submit a patch to the Linux kernel that would allow it to parse Microsoft's authenticode signing using a master X.509 key embedded in PE files signed by Microsoft.
Common device driver compatibility issues include: a 32-bit device driver is required for a 32-bit Windows operating system, and a 64-bit device driver is required for a 64-bit Windows operating system. 64-bit device drivers must be signed by Microsoft, because they run in kernel mode and have unrestricted access to the computer hardware. For ...