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Windows 98 Setup simplifies installation, reducing the bulk of user input required. [65] The Windows 98 Startup Disk contains generic, real-mode ATAPI and SCSI CD-ROM drivers that can be used instead in the event that the specific driver for a CD-ROM is unavailable. [66] The system could be updated using Windows Update. [64]
Setup begins to expand Windows files using a WIM image (aka install.wim). If the user has picked to upgrade from a current install of Windows (e.g. Windows 7 to 10), the files and applications will be transferred. If booting from the installation disk, the bootloader is installed (in the case of Windows Vista and above, this would be BOOTMGR).
For NT and NT-based operating systems, it also allows the user to pass preconfigured options to the kernel. The menu options are stored in boot.ini, which itself is located in the root of the same disk as NTLDR. Though NTLDR can boot DOS and non-NT versions of Windows, boot.ini cannot configure their boot options.
A modern PC is configured to attempt to boot from various devices in a certain order. If a computer is not booting from the device desired, such as the floppy drive, the user may have to enter the BIOS Setup function by pressing a special key when the computer is first turned on (such as Delete, F1, F2, F10 or F12), and then changing the boot order. [6]
On system with BIOS firmware, the BIOS invokes MBR boot code from a hard disk drive at startup. The MBR boot code and the VBR boot code are OS-specific. In Microsoft Windows, the MBR boot code tries to find an active partition (the MBR is only 512 bytes), then executes the VBR boot code of an active partition.
The Master boot record is loaded at address 7C00h and loads the boot sector of the Windows Disk partition. The boot sector contains the disk boot program and BIOS Parameter Block table which searches for the location of the root directory and IO.SYS file, which then loads the IO.SYS file into memory.
MSCDEX or Microsoft CD-ROM Extensions is a software program produced by Microsoft and included with MS-DOS 6.x [1] and certain versions of Windows to provide CD-ROM support. [2] Earlier versions of MSCDEX since 1986 were installable add-ons for MS-DOS 3.1 and higher.
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.