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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.
A bootable MBR device is defined as one that can be read from, and where the last two bytes of the first sector contain the little-endian word AA55h, [nb 7] found as byte sequence 55h, AAh on disk (also known as the MBR boot signature), or where it is otherwise established that the code inside the sector is executable on x86 PCs.
The boot loader; performs basic system initialization options such as loading the hardware abstraction layer and boot-time device drivers, prior to passing control to the Windows kernel. In versions prior to Vista, NTLDR and IA64ldr also display menus to the user if multiple operating systems are defined in boot.ini , or if F8 is pressed.
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]
Before Windows 7, the system and boot partitions were, by default, the same and were given the "C:" drive letter. [7]: 971 Since Windows 7, however, Windows Setup creates, by default, a separate system partition that is not given an identifier and therefore is hidden. The boot partition is still given "C:" as its identifier.
Boot support Note Windows 9x: 1995-08-24 IA-32: No [b] No Windows XP: 2001-10-25 IA-32 No No Windows Server 2003: 2003-04-24 IA-32 No No Windows Server 2003 SP1: 2005-03-30 IA-32 Yes No MBR takes precedence in hybrid configuration. Windows Vista: 2006-07-22 IA-32 Yes No MBR takes precedence in hybrid configuration. Windows Server 2008: 2008-02 ...
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The boot code in the VBR can assume that the BIOS has set up its data structures and interrupts and initialized the hardware. The code should not assume more than 32 KB of memory to be present for fail-safe operation; [1] if it needs more memory it should query INT 12h for it, since other pre-boot code (such as f.e. BIOS extension overlays, encryption systems, or remote bootstrap loaders) may ...