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Booting. A flow diagram of a computer booting. In computing, booting is the process of starting a computer as initiated via hardware such as a button on the computer or by a software command. After it is switched on, a computer's central processing unit (CPU) has no software in its main memory, so some process must load software into memory ...
Unlike the legacy PC BIOS, UEFI does not rely on boot sectors, defining instead a boot manager as part of the UEFI specification. When a computer is powered on, the boot manager checks the boot configuration and, based on its settings, then executes the specified OS boot loader or operating system kernel (usually boot loader [61]).
EFI system partition. The EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) system partition or ESP is a partition on a data storage device (usually a hard disk drive or solid-state drive) that is used by computers that have the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). When a computer is booted, UEFI firmware loads files stored on the ESP to start ...
A boot disk is a removable digital data storage medium from which a computer can load and run (boot) an operating system or utility program. [1] The computer must have a built-in program which will load and execute a program from a boot disk meeting certain standards. While almost all modern computers can boot from a hard drive containing the ...
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). Usually, the first sector of the hard disk is the boot sector, regardless of ...
System partition and boot partition. 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 ...
In Windows NT, the booting process is initiated by NTLDR in versions before Vista and the Windows Boot Manager 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. Once all the boot and system drivers have been loaded, the ...
On the original IBM PC and XT, if no bootable disk was found, the BIOS would try to start ROM BASIC with the interrupt call to interrupt 18h. Since few programs used BASIC in ROM, clone PC makers left it out; then a computer that failed to boot from a disk would display "No ROM BASIC" and halt (in response to interrupt 18h).