CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

6.2. Standard Boot Process for Windows 2000 and XP

Windows XP—based OSes (from Windows NT3.1 to Windows XP) have their roots in IBM's OS/2. It is partly because of this history that their boot process is very different from older OSes, such as Windows 9x or MS-DOS. Unlike Windows 9x, there is no real-mode boot component to the OS; Windows XP is a pure 32-bit or 64-bit OS. So the boot processes are similar only until the boot loader is located at the end of the POST process.

The boot sector is created when the disk is formatted, and it contains a small program that has a mini file-system driver to read FAT, FAT32, and NTFS partitions. This program then looks for the real boot loader, which is ntldr.

NOTE

Because of ARC naming conventions, Microsoft refers to the drive that has the boot sector on it as the system partition, and to the partition that has the windows directory on it as the boot partition. (You can read about ARC in a bit.) To help keep these terms straight, remember that the OS does not really "boot" until ntoskrnl.exe is launched from the windows directory. The windows directory for a Windows 2000 computer is winnt.

Windows 2000 and newer OSes use many of the same files as MS-DOS and Windows 9x. However, many files are specific to Windows 2000 and newer OSes. The following sections provide an overview of the Windows 2000 or Windows XP–specific files.

6.2.1. ntldr

The job of ntldr — the boot loader for Windows XP—based OSes — is to coordinate the loading of the ...