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When booting, the loader portion of NTLDR does the following in order: Accesses the file system on the boot drive (either FAT or New Technology File System, NTFS). If Windows was put in the hibernation state, the contents of hiberfil.sys are loaded into memory and the system resumes where it left off.
It is the standard format for executables on Windows NT-based systems, including files such as .exe, .dll, .sys (for system drivers), and .mui. At its core, the PE format is a structured data container that gives the Windows operating system loader eveything it needs to properly manage the executable code it contains.
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.
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. Once all the boot and system drivers have been loaded, the kernel starts the session manager ( smss.exe ), which begins the login process .
In Unix, the loader is the handler for the system call execve(). [1] The Unix loader's tasks include: validation (permissions, memory requirements etc.); memory-mapping the executable object from the disk into main memory; copying the command-line arguments into virtual memory; initializing registers (e.g., the stack pointer);
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]
WIM images can be made bootable and Windows boot loader supports booting Windows from a WIM file. Windows Setup DVD in Windows Vista and later use such WIM files. In this case, BOOT.WIM contains a bootable version of Windows PE from which the installation is performed. Other setup files are held in the INSTALL.WIM.
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.