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Though NTLDR and boot.ini are no longer used to boot Windows Vista and later versions of Windows NT, they ship with the bootcfg utility regardless. This is to handle boot.ini in the case that a multi-boot configuration with previous versions of Windows exists and needs troubleshooting from within the later operating system.
During the boot phase, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are executed, along with the configuration settings files WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI. Virtual device drivers are also loaded in the startup process: they are most commonly loaded from the registry ( HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD ) or from the SYSTEM.INI file.
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.
First-stage MBR boot loaders may face peculiar constraints, especially in size; for instance, on the earlier IBM PC and compatibles, a boot sector should typically work with 510 bytes of code (or less) and in only 32 KiB [4] [5] (later relaxed to 64 KiB [6]) of system memory and only use instructions supported by the original 8088/8086 processors.
EasyBCD has a number of bootloader-related features that can be used to repair and configure the bootloader. From the "Manage Bootloader" section of EasyBCD, it is possible to switch between the BOOTMGR bootloader (used since Windows Vista) and the NTLDR bootloader (used by legacy versions of Windows, from Windows NT to Windows XP) in the MBR from within Windows by simply clicking a button.
Though NTLDR can boot DOS and non-NT versions of Windows, boot.ini cannot configure their boot options. For NT-based OSs, the location of the operating system is written as an Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) path. boot.ini is protected from user configuration by having the following file attributes: system, hidden, read-only.
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 multi-boot configuration allows a user to use all of their software on one computer. This is often accomplished by using a boot loader such as NTLDR, LILO, or GRUB which can boot more than one operating system. Multi-booting is also used by software developers when multiple operating systems are required for development or testing purposes ...