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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 ...
Forensic disk controllers intercept write commands from the host operating system, preventing them from reaching the drive. Whenever the host bus architecture supports it the controller reports that the drive is read-only. The disk controller can either deny all writes to the disk and report them as failures, or use on-board memory to cache the ...
These strategies can be preselected by a user or OEM or be changed by a boot loader on the fly when launching DR-DOS. Under these issues, the boot drive can be different from A: or C: as well. The drive letter order can depend on whether a given disk is managed by a boot-time driver or by a dynamically loaded driver.
The boot code in the VBR can assume that the BIOS has set up its data structures and interrupts and initialized the hardware. The code should not assume more than 32 KB of memory to be present for fail-safe operation; [1] if it needs more memory it should query INT 12h for it, since other pre-boot code (such as f.e. BIOS extension overlays, encryption systems, or remote bootstrap loaders) may ...
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. Available on Itanium-based computers only. [24]
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 ...
Once all the boot and system drivers have been loaded, the kernel starts the session manager (smss.exe), which begins the login process. After the user has successfully logged into the machine, winlogon applies User and Computer Group Policy setting and runs startup programs declared in the Windows Registry and in "Startup" folders.
The MBR contains code necessary to boot the Operating System, as well as information about where partitions are stored on the hard drive. Though the user's data remains on the hard drive, the Operating System is unable to access it without the MBR. In some cases, it may be possible to recover data from a hard drive with a modified MBR. [3]