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The Windows boot manager is located at the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ subfolder of the EFI system partition. [23] On Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and later, access to the EFI system partition is obtained by running the mountvol command. Mounts the EFI system partition on the specified drive. Available on Itanium-based computers only. [24]
The system partition is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root. By default, in Linux, operating system files are mounted at / (the root directory). In Linux, a single partition can be both a boot and a system partition if both /boot/ and the root directory are in the same partition.
A separate partition is generally only used when bootloaders are incapable of reading the main filesystem (e.g. LILO does not recognize XFS) or other problems not easily resolvable by users. [citation needed] On UEFI systems, including most modern PCs, the EFI system partition is often mounted at /boot/, /efi/ or /boot/efi/. [6] [7]
The starting location of the array on disk, and the size of each entry, are given in the GPT header. The first 16 bytes of each entry designate the partition type's globally unique identifier (GUID). For example, the GUID for an EFI system partition is C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B. The second 16 bytes are a GUID unique to the partition.
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.
Each partition can be formatted with a file system or as a swap partition. Multiple partitions allow directories such as /boot, /tmp, /usr, /var, or /home to be allocated their own filesystems. Such a scheme has a number of advantages: If one file system gets corrupted, the data outside that filesystem/partition may stay intact, minimizing data ...
Once all the boot and system drivers have been loaded, the kernel starts the session manager (smss.exe), which begins the login process. After the user has successfully logged into the machine, winlogon applies User and Computer Group Policy setting and runs startup programs declared in the Windows Registry and in "Startup" folders.
A volume boot record (VBR) is the first sector of a data storage device that has not been partitioned, or the first sector of an individual partition on a data storage device that has been partitioned. It may contain code to load an operating system (or other standalone program) installed on that device or within that partition.