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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 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".
Before Windows 7, the system and boot partitions were, by default, the same and were given the "C:" drive letter. [7]: 971 Since Windows 7, however, Windows Setup creates, by default, a separate system partition that is not given an identifier and therefore is hidden. The boot partition is still given "C:" as its identifier.
The menu options are stored in boot.ini, which itself is located in the root of the same disk as NTLDR. Though NTLDR can boot DOS and non-NT versions of Windows, boot.ini cannot configure their boot options. For NT-based OSs, the location of the operating system is written as an Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) path.
UEFI support in Windows began in 2008 with Windows Vista SP1. [22] The Windows boot manager is located at the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ subfolder of the EFI system partition. [23] On Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and later, access to the EFI system partition is obtained by running the mountvol command. Mounts the EFI system partition on the specified drive.
Used during the boot process to detect basic hardware components that may be required during the boot process Windows Boot Manager: In Windows Vista and later operating systems, displays boot menus to the user if multiple operating systems are configured in the system's Boot Configuration Data. Graphical subsystem: Desktop Window Manager: DWM
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Versions of Windows more recent than Windows XP support the larger sector sizes, as well as Mac OS X, and Linux has supported larger sector sizes since 2.6.31 [20] or 2.6.32, [21] but issues with boot loaders, partitioning tools and computer BIOS implementations present certain limitations, [22] since they are often hard-wired to reserve only ...