Microsoft® Windows® XP Unleashed

How Windows Boots

This is where things start to get interesting (or should I say, complicated). The MBR is a small program typically found on the first sector of a hard drive, though it can also be located on removable media such as a floppy disk. If this is the case, you can configure your BIOS to point directly at the removable media drive where the MBR can be found.

Because the MBR is so small, not much can really be done with it. In fact, the MBR used in Windows XP has only one function. It loads a program called NT Loader (NTLDR) into memory.

Note

NTLDR is probably a name you recognize. When a computer tries to boot from a disk that is not bootable, but has been formatted with a Windows XP-compatible file system, you will often see the message, ...