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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]
Award BIOS setup utility on a standard PC. A modern BIOS setup utility has a text user interface (TUI) or graphical user interface (GUI) accessed by pressing a certain key on the keyboard when the PC starts. Usually, the key is advertised for short time during the early startup, for example "Press DEL to enter Setup".
Open Firmware defines a standard way to describe the hardware configuration of a system, called the device tree. [3] This helps the operating system to better understand the configuration of the host computer, relying less on user configuration and hardware polling.
In computing, the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) specification defines data structures (and access methods) that can be used to read management information produced by the BIOS of a computer. [1] This eliminates the need for the operating system to probe hardware directly to discover what devices are present in the computer.
An option ROM for the PC platform (i.e. the IBM PC and derived successor computer systems) is a piece of firmware that resides in ROM on an expansion card (or stored along with the main system BIOS), which gets executed to initialize the device and (optionally) add support for the device to the BIOS.
In the classic Mac OS, similar functionality to the verification features of Disk Utility could be found in the Disk First Aid application. Another application called Drive Setup was used for drive formatting and partitioning and the application Disk Copy was used for working with disk images.
Boot Camp Assistant is a multi boot utility included with Apple Inc.'s macOS (previously Mac OS X / OS X) that assists users in installing Microsoft Windows operating systems on Intel-based Macintosh computers.
Despite Microsoft's radically different definition (see below), System Information, a utility app included in Windows NT family of operating systems, refers to it as "boot device". [2] [3] The system partition is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root.