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The Windows Boot Manager invokes winload.exe—the operating system boot loader—to load the operating system kernel executive (ntoskrnl.exe) and core device drivers. In that respect, winload.exe is functionally equivalent to the operating system loader function of NTLDR in prior versions of Windows NT.
NTLDR (abbreviation of NT loader) is the boot loader for all releases of Windows NT operating system from 1993 with the release of Windows NT 3.1 up until Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. From Windows Vista onwards it was replaced by the BOOTMGR bootloader.
GNU GRUB, a popular open source bootloader Windows bootloader. A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader [1] [2] or called bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer. If it also provides an interactive menu with multiple boot choices then it's often called a boot manager. [2]
In Microsoft Windows 7 and above, the loader is the LdrInitializeThunk function contained in ntdll.dll, which does the following: initialisation of structures in the DLL itself (i.e. critical sections, module lists); validation of executable to load; creation of a heap (via the function RtlCreateHeap);
Since Windows NT 3.1 (the first version of Windows NT), [4] Microsoft has defined the terms as follows: . The system partition (or system volume) [5] is a primary partition that contains the boot loader, a piece of software responsible for booting the operating system.
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".
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Note: The column MBR (Master Boot Record) refers to whether or not the boot loader can be stored in the first sector of a mass storage device. The column VBR (Volume Boot Record) refers to the ability of the boot loader to be stored in the first sector of any partition on a mass storage device.