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When a user is logging on to Windows, the startup sound is played, the shell (usually EXPLORER.EXE) is loaded from the [boot] section of the SYSTEM.INI file, and startup items are loaded. In all versions of Windows 9x except ME, it is also possible to load Windows by booting to a DOS prompt and typing "win".
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.
The boot sector or UEFI loads the Windows Boot Manager (a file named BOOTMGR on either the system or the boot partition), accesses the Boot Configuration Data store and uses the information to load the operating system through winload.exe or winresume.exe on BIOS systems, and winload.efi and winresume.efi on UEFI systems. [2]
For example, in the standard Linux directory layout (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard), boot files (such as the kernel, initrd, and boot loader GRUB) are mounted at /boot/. [1] Despite Microsoft's radically different definition (see below), System Information, a utility app included in Windows NT family of operating systems, refers to it as "boot ...
The System Deployment Image (SDI) file format is often used to allow the use of a virtual disk for startup or booting. Some versions of Microsoft Windows allow for "RAM booting", which is essentially the ability to load an SDI file into memory and then boot from it.
Some virtual machine infrastructure can directly import and export a boot image for direct installation to "bare metal", i.e. a disk. This is the standard technique for OEMs to install identical copies of an operating system on many identical machines: The boot image is created as a virtual machine and then exported, or created on one disk and then copied via a boot image control ...
A more secure fashion to edit the file is to use the bootcfg command from a console. bootcfg will also relock the file (setting the file back to system, hidden, and read-only). Additionally, the file can be edited within Windows using a text editor if the folder view option "Show hidden files and folders" is selected, the folder view option ...
The VBR is often OS-specific; however, its main function is to load and execute the operating system boot loader file (such as bootmgr or ntldr), which is the second-stage boot loader, from an active partition.