Know Your Computer Booting Process

It happens with everybody. You have been invited for an occasion, first thing you do is to prepare yourself. It is the similar case when you when you turn on your computer.On starting the computer, operating system is loaded to prepare the system for further use. This set of instructions are named as booting process. Boot derives its name from the phrase “to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps”. to get ready. The Startup mean the same thing as boot. Every computer has a boot sequence.

How Does It Work?

As soon as the power button is pressed, the motherboard and all the components get power from the supply unit. The next steps are handled by BIOS. The computer knows how to boot as the instructions are built into one of its chips, the BIOS. This basic input/output system gets the computer started with central processing unit getting its instructions from its cache memory. The CPU, the computer brain, reads the instruction and searches for the hard disks, CD drives, keyboard, mouse and printer. The BIOS program looks at the first sector for boot code.

If BIOS encounters any problem with the hardware, it displays the error messages, called POST – which checks and tests the basic hardware and reads master boot record. Otherwise, it displays various information about the BIOS manufacturer and RAM on the monitor. Problems sometimes do occur while booting, but they are not common.

The booting process continues to maintain the master boot record and hands over the process to the volume boot, which is then taken over by boot manager to complete the process.

The bootloader which is present in the first sector of the hard disk. This program loads the operating system into the computer memory for your use. BOOTMGR program is used to complete the job in the latest versions of Windows.

Hard (Cold) Boot and Soft (Warm) Boot

A hard boot is termed when the computer is started after it had been switched off – the components were without any power. A hard boot is also called when the computer performs a power-on self-test, or POST. Hard reboot is the process of holding down power button to shutdown the computer so that it restarts again.

In soft boot, when the operating system alone is restarted after a system crash and the power is available to the computer components.

Useful Information

• If you are enthusiastic about knowing how you can boot a computer using a flash drive, well! the great news is at a certain stage, booting lets the user do that. For that, you need to modify boot order. As a result of this, the BIOS of your computer will seek another device instead of the OS on the hard drive.
• If the user wants to include specific applications or commands as part of process, he can do so in the file named as WIN.INI (Windows). However, you may recall, this file was named as AUTOEXEC.BAT in MS-DOS.
• Booting does the initialization of a computerized system. This process can also load a storage dump program for diagnosing problems in an operating system, in addition to stand-alone utility.