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The BIOS uses the boot devices set in Nonvolatile BIOS memory , or, in the earliest PCs, DIP switches. The BIOS checks each device in order to see if it is bootable by attempting to load the first sector (boot sector). If the sector cannot be read, the BIOS proceeds to the next device.
GRUB, with entries for Ubuntu and Windows Vista, an example of dual booting. Multi-booting is the act of installing multiple operating systems on a single computer, and being able to choose which one to boot.
Older, less common BIOS-bootable devices include floppy disk drives, Zip drives, and LS-120 drives. Typically, the system firmware (UEFI or BIOS) will allow the user to configure a boot order. If the boot order is set to "first, the DVD drive; second, the hard disk drive", then the firmware will try to boot from the DVD drive, and if this fails ...
UEFI replaces the BIOS that was present in the boot ROM of all personal computers that are IBM PC compatible, [5] [6] although it can provide backwards compatibility with the BIOS using CSM booting. Unlike its predecessor, BIOS, which is a de facto standard originally created by IBM as proprietary software, UEFI is an open standard maintained ...
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.
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.
When a system on a chip (SoC) enters suspend to RAM mode, in many cases, the processor is completely off while the RAM is put in self refresh mode. At resume, the boot ROM is executed again and many boot ROMs are able to detect that the SoC was in suspend to RAM and can resume by jumping directly to the kernel which then takes care of powering on again the peripherals which were off and ...
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 ...