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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.
The boot partition (or boot volume) [5] is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root or %systemroot% in Windows NT. [6]: 174 Before Windows 7, the system and boot partitions were, by default, the same and were given the "C:" drive letter.
On Apple Mac computers using Intel x86-64 processor architecture, the EFI system partition is initially left blank and unused for booting into macOS. [13] [14]However, the EFI system partition is used as a staging area for firmware updates [15] and for the Microsoft Windows bootloader for Mac computers configured to boot into a Windows partition using Boot Camp.
A bootable MBR device is defined as one that can be read from, and where the last two bytes of the first sector contain the little-endian word AA55h, [nb 7] found as byte sequence 55h, AAh on disk (also known as the MBR boot signature), or where it is otherwise established that the code inside the sector is executable on x86 PCs.
A modern PC is configured to attempt to boot from various devices in a certain order. If a computer is not booting from the device desired, such as the floppy drive, the user may have to enter the BIOS Setup function by pressing a special key when the computer is first turned on (such as Delete, F1, F2, F10 or F12), and then changing the boot order. [6]
Non-Macintosh systems, notably Windows and Linux, may not be typically booted in EFI mode and thus USB booting may be limited to supported hardware and software combinations that can easily be booted via EFI. [8] However, programs like Mac Linux USB Loader can alleviate the difficulties of the task of booting a Linux-live USB on a Mac.
EasyBCD supports booting into WinPE 2.0+ WIM images stored on any local partition by providing the path to the WIM file. It automatically re-configures the BCD to add support for the WIM format. It can also boot into a Windows PE filesystem extracted to the root of a mounted drive letter.
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.