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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 ...
Power-on self-test. A power-on self-test (POST) is a process performed by firmware or software routines immediately after a computer or other digital electronic device is powered on. [1] POST processes may set the initial state of the device from firmware and detect if any hardware components are non-functional.
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 ...
A hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer. A hard disk failure may occur in the course of normal operation, or due to an external factor such as exposure to fire or water or high magnetic fields, or suffering a sharp impact or ...
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 ...
Crash (computing) A kernel panic displayed on an iMac. This is the most common form of an operating system failure in Unix-like systems. In computing, a crash, or system crash, occurs when a computer program such as a software application or an operating system stops functioning properly and exits. On some operating systems or individual ...
For example, this failure is sometimes caused by a missing file. [1] This also occurs when the user enables file compression on all the files and the operating system compresses. Rarely an experienced user must reinstall Windows. In the case of the former, the boot loader will most likely inform the user the name of the missing file.
The Linux booting process involves multiple stages and is in many ways similar to the BSD and other Unix -style boot processes, from which it derives. Although the Linux booting process depends very much on the computer architecture, those architectures share similar stages and software components, [1] including system startup, bootloader ...