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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 actual key depends on specific hardware. The settings key is most often Delete (Acer, ASRock, Asus PC, ECS, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac) and F2 (Asus motherboard, Dell, Lenovo laptop, Origin PC, Samsung, Toshiba), but it can also be F1 (Lenovo desktop) and F10 . [50] Features present in the BIOS setup utility typically include:
A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader [1] [2] or called bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer and booting an operating system. If it also provides an interactive menu with multiple boot choices then it's often called a boot manager .
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.
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.
Unlocking the bootloader allows installing and running unsigned code on a device, including user customized software. Operating outside the manufacturer specification might usually result in voiding any warranties and may make the device susceptible to data theft, as the integrity of the operating system (as intended by the manufacturer) can no longer be guaranteed. [1]
SMM is a special-purpose operating mode provided for handling system-wide functions like power management, system hardware control, or proprietary OEM designed code. It is intended for use only by system firmware ( BIOS or UEFI ), not by applications software or general-purpose systems software.
Safe mode is a diagnostic mode of a computer operating system (OS). It can also refer to a mode of operation by application software. Safe mode is intended to help fix most, if not all, problems within an operating system. It is also widely used for removing rogue security software.