Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The password changing feature is also prone to errors, so password blanking is highly recommended (in fact, for later versions of Windows it is the only possible option). Furthermore, the bootable image might have problems with controllers requiring 3rd party drivers.
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".
System Locked Pre-installation (SLP), also referred to as OEM Activation, is a product activation procedure for Microsoft Windows used by major OEMs of laptops and pre-built PCs wherein a Windows product key is added and locked to the machine's firmware before mass distribution. SLP product keys cannot be moved to other machines.
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. [6]: 1087 This partition holds the boot sector and is marked active. [7]: 970
The Security Account Manager (SAM) is a database file [1] in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8.1, 10 and 11 that stores users' passwords. It can be used to authenticate local and remote users. Beginning with Windows 2000 SP4, Active Directory authenticates remote users.
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 cold boot attack may also be necessary when a hard disk is encrypted with full disk encryption and the disk potentially contains evidence of criminal activity. A cold boot attack provides access to the memory, which can provide information about the state of the system at the time such as what programs are running. [3]
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. The VBR boot code tries to find and execute the bootmgr file from an active partition. [3] On systems with UEFI firmware, UEFI invokes bootmgfw.efi from an EFI system partition at startup ...