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Restarting a computer also is called rebooting, which can be "hard", e.g. after electrical power to the CPU is switched from off to on, or "soft", where the power is not cut. On some systems, a soft boot may optionally clear RAM to zero. Both hard and soft booting can be initiated by hardware such as a button press or by a software command.
The system partition and the boot partition (also known as the system volume and the boot volume) are computing terms for disk partitions of a hard disk drive or solid-state drive that must exist and be properly configured for a computer to operate. There are two different definitions for these terms: the common definition and the Microsoft ...
The term boot comes from the idea of lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps: [5] the computer contains a tiny program (bootstrap loader) which will load and run a program found on a boot device. This program may itself be a small program designed to load a larger and more capable program, i.e., the full operating system.
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 .
The computer term bootstrap began as a metaphor in the 1950s. In computers, pressing a bootstrap button caused a hardwired program to read a bootstrap program from an input unit. The computer would then execute the bootstrap program, which caused it to read more program instructions.
Cold start (or cold boot) may also refer to a booting process of a single computer (or virtual machine). [2] In this case services and other startup applications are executed after reboot. The system is typically made available to the user even though startup operations are still performed and slow down other operations.
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. [5]
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).