What an Operating System Does
When you first turn on your computer, you hear the fan spinning and the disk drives start churning. The first program to run is the computer's ROM (read-only memory). This is a lot like waking up in the morning; you blink and make sure that you still have two hands, two arms, two legs, and everything is ready to go. The boot program checks the system hardware to make sure it's all connected and ready to go. The POST (power on self-test) looks for errors in the CPU, memory, and the BIOS (basic input-output systems). Once the POST is complete, the ROM will activate the drive where the boot information is stored. The OS's bootstrap loader is activated.
The bootstrap loader is a program with one function: to load the ...
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