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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.
A boot sector is the sector of a persistent data storage device (e.g., hard disk, floppy disk, optical disc, etc.) which contains machine code to be loaded into random-access memory (RAM) and then executed by a computer system's built-in firmware (e.g., the BIOS).
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.
If the boot order is set to "first, the DVD drive; second, the hard disk drive", then the firmware will try to boot from the DVD drive, and if this fails (e.g. because there is no DVD in the drive), it will try to boot from the local hard disk drive. For example, on a PC with Windows installed on the hard drive, the user could set the boot ...
The GUID Partition Table (Globally Unique IDentifier) is a part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk. Many operating systems now support this standard. However, Windows does not support this on BIOS based computers. [10]
A computer's firmware may be manually updated by a user via a small utility program. In contrast, firmware in mass storage devices (hard-disk drives, optical disc drives, flash memory storage e.g. solid state drive) is less frequently updated, even when flash memory (rather than ROM, EEPROM) storage is used for the firmware.
Some operating systems, notably Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, do not configure themselves to load the AHCI driver upon boot if the SATA controller was not in AHCI mode at the time the operating system was installed. Although this is an easily rectifiable condition, it remains an ongoing issue with the AHCI ...
Windows Vista introduced a hybrid sleep feature, which saves the contents of memory to hard disk but instead of powering down, enters sleep mode. If the power is lost, the computer can resume as if hibernated. Windows 7 introduced compression to the hibernation file and set the default size to 75% of the total physical memory. [18]