Windows Vista | Windows Vista Review

The Windows Vista boot process differs from Windows ® XP in the way the operating system is located and initialized. Implementation begins with the BIOS loads the Master Boot Record (MBR) boot disk. The MBR in turn loads the Partition Boot Record (PBR) on the active partition. Until now, Windows Vista remains relatively unchanged.

Windows Vista is different from XP starting by the fact the PBR code written for Windows Vista no longer looks Ntldr. The new boot manager bootmgr Windows Vista. This loads the component database boot configuration (BCD), which in turn loads a boot application operating system loader (Winload.exe, in the case of Windows Vista). Finally, the application operating system loader is responsible for initializing the kernel. This process is illustrated below.

You can think of this change in two elements:

1. The two key actions by Ntldr in earlier versions of Windows have been divided into two components:

2. Bootmgr reads the boot configuration, including device location and path.

WindowsSystem32Winload.exe initializes the kernel.

The startup configuration stored in Boot.ini in previous Windows versions is now stored in a database expandable BootBCD The database Boot (BCD).

These changes are significant because of the impact they have:

The boot process can be extended to support other applications, like other operating systems or other operating system versions.

Nonversion only specific components are stored in the root of the active partition. This means that, theoretically, Windows Vista can be installed on a machine with a future version of Windows with the same starting structure, and not break the boot process so that future versions. With legacy Windows, installing an earlier version of Windows makes the latest version latest to fail at startup. This is because specific code improvements version of NTLDR.