What is Booting
I have talked about ways to increase your bootup speed but James from Miami wanted to know exactly what a boot up is. Basically he is aware that a boot starts up your computer, but how does it work?
In computing, booting (booting up) is a bootstrapping process that starts operating systems when the user turns on a computer system. A boot sequence is the set of operations the computer performs when it is switched on that loads an operating system.
Most computer systems can only execute code found in the memory (ROM or RAM). Modern operating systems are stored on hard disks, or occasionally on LiveCDs, USB flash drives, or other non-volatile storage devices. When a computer is first powered on, it doesn’t have an operating system in memory.
The computer’s hardware alone cannot perform complex actions such as loading a program from disk, so an apparent paradox exists: to load the operating system into memory, one appears to need to have an operating system already loaded.
The solution is to use a special small program, called a bootstrap loader, bootstrap or boot loader. This program’s only job is to load other software for the operating system to start.
Often, multiple-stage boot loaders are used, in which several small programs of increasing complexity summon each other, until the last of them loads the operating system. The name bootstrap loader comes from the image of one pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps (see bootstrapping).
It derives from the very earliest days of computers and is possibly one of the oldest pieces of computer terminology in common use.
