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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. The VBR boot code tries to find ...
If the boot order is set to "first, the DVD drive; second, the hard disk drive", then the firmware will try to boot from the DVD drive, and if this fails (e.g. because there is no DVD in the drive), it will try to boot from the local hard disk drive.
On Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows Server 2012, changing from IDE mode to AHCI mode without first updating the registry will make the boot drive inaccessible (i.e. resulting in a recurring boot loop, which begins with a Blue Screen error).
The bootloader must navigate disk structures, often implementing FAT file system support, and manage the delicate transition from the BIOS startup state to a stable environment for the next boot stage. First-stage MBR boot loaders may face peculiar constraints, especially in size; for instance, on the earlier IBM PC and compatibles, a boot ...
BIOS interrupt calls perform hardware control or I/O functions requested by a program, return system information to the program, or do both. A key element of the purpose of BIOS calls is abstraction - the BIOS calls perform generally defined functions, and the specific details of how those functions are executed on the particular hardware of the system are encapsulated in the BIOS and hidden ...
The first HDD RAMAC and most early disk drives used complex mechanisms to load and unload the heads. Nearly all modern HDDs use ramp loading, first introduced by Memorex in 1967, [9] to load/unload onto plastic "ramps" near the outer disk edge. Laptop drives adopted this due to the need for increased shock resistance, and then ultimately it was ...
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]
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]