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In Windows Vista and later, the tool allows configuring various switches for Windows Boot Manager and Boot Configuration Data. It also gained additional support for launching a variety of tools, such as system information, other configuration areas, such as Internet options, and the ability to enable/disable UAC.
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.
For a cold boot, for example, it may need to execute all of its functionality. If, however, the system supports power saving or quick boot methods, the BIOS may be able to circumvent the standard POST device discovery, and simply program the devices from a preloaded system device table.
A boot menu such as the textual menu of Windows, which allows users to choose an operating system to boot, to boot into the safe mode, or to use the last known good configuration, is displayed through BIOS and receives keyboard input through BIOS. [4]
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 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]
In principle, an option ROM could provide any sort of firmware extension, such as a library of video graphics subroutines, or a set of PCM audio processing services, and cause it to be installed into the system RAM and optionally the CPU interrupt system before boot time. A common option ROM is the video BIOS which gets loaded very early on in ...
These choices can include different operating systems (for dual or multi-booting from different partitions or drives), different versions of the same operating system (in case a new version has unexpected problems), different operating system loading options (e.g., booting into a rescue or safe mode), and some standalone programs that can ...