Commercial space tourism company Blue Origin, and its overlord Jeff Bezos, have been pretty quiet over the last few months. But last week, the Amazon founder made his. Windows NT startup process - Wikipedia. The Windows NT startup process is the process by which Windows NT 4. Windows 2. 00. 0, Windows XP and Windows Server 2. In Windows Vista and later, this process has changed slightly; see Windows Vista startup process for information about what has changed. Installer[edit]The Windows NT installer works very similarly to a regular Windows NT install except that it runs from a CD- ROM. For this boot method to work, the BIOS must be compatible with the El Torito specification. The ISO 9. 66. 0 file system on the install CD is not fully compatible with the standard. Although it is "Level 1", the file names don't have the file version appended to it. The boot image is of the "no emulation" type, 1 sector long (2. It can be extracted from an ISO image by using 7- zip. The ISO image is also not hybridized like ISO images from most Linux distributions and therefore it does not contain any master boot record (MBR) which makes it unable to boot by just copying the image over a block device such as a pen drive. GA-945GM-S2 / GA-945GMF-S2 Intel® CoreTM 2 Extreme / CoreTM 2 Duo Intel® Pentium® D / Pentium® 4 LGA775 Processor Motherboard User's Manual. The installer can also be run from a MS- DOS command prompt so previous versions of Microsoft Windows that are already installed can be upgraded. To run the installer from a MS- DOS based operating system such as Windows 9. Windows ME, the user must start the system "in DOS mode" and then execute I3. WINNT. EXE on the CD- ROM.[2][3]A floppy disk containing MS- DOS can be used to start the installer. Versions of the installer in floppies were also available for sale.[4] From Vista onwards, the installer runs from BOOT. WIM which contains a bootable version of Windows PE. Windows PE is based on the Vista kernel.[5]CD- ROM boot image phase[edit]On a regular CD- ROM install, the BIOS executes the POST and then searches for a boot descriptor on the CD- ROM. The boot descriptor points to a boot catalog file on the ISO 9. The BIOS searches for a boot image compatible with the current architecture, loads it into memory and then runs it. The boot image is analogous to the boot sector on a hard drive. The boot image loads SETUPLDR. Tutorial #82 explains how you can use one XP ISO to start an automated, semi-automated or manual install onto any system, and automatically add the specific drivers.BIN which is analogous to NTLDR. If this fails for any reason, a message is displayed saying that NTLDR was not found, which may of itself be misleading; moreover, the NTLDR on the CD is never used during the loading phase of the installer. The process also assumes that file versions are unavailable. Before starting the boot loader, the boot image checks whether there is a Windows install (system) already present and, if so, it starts BOOTFIX. BIN. If no install is found, or if the disk does not have an MBR, then it starts the boot loader directly, thus obviating the need for BOOTFIX. BIN. If BOOTFIX. BIN is started, it displays the string "Press any key to boot from CD." and waits for user input. If none is detected for some seconds, then it boots the next device, and so on. This behavior is essential for booting the second stage of the installer, which starts from the hard disk. Boot loader phase[edit]Both SETUPLDR. BIN and NTLDR are composed of two binary files concatenated. They also can be found on the installation CD as compressed CAB files. The first file is STPBOOT. BIN, which is a flat binary file that just loads the second file. The second file is a regular EXE file in the Portable Executable format. In SETUPLDR. BIN the second file is SETUPLDR. EXE and in NTLDR the second file is OSLOADER. EXE. Both SETUPLDR. EXE and OSLOADER. EXE have embedded file system drivers for basic access on FAT, NTFS and ISO 9. Differently from regular *. SYS drivers, the boot loader uses BIOS interrupts to access the boot disk. It also contain a built- in INI parser and CAB decompressor. After the installer starts running, it prints the string "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration..". NTDETECT. COM is called and the system information is stored in memory. Then it displays blue screen in VGA text mode with the title "Windows Setup" and a white line on the bottom that behaves as a status bar then it looks for TXTSETUP. SIF and parses it. This file works as key- value database just like *. INI, *. INF or the registry. The keys may either contain a list of files associated with their install location or a script line. Therefore, the database stores data and code. During the parsing, the blank lines are ignored and sections with the same name are merged. The file BIOSINFO. INF is also loaded to resolve hardware quirks. The key- value syntax in the Source. Disks. Files section is as follows: [6][7][8]filename_on_source=disk_id,subdir,upgrade_code,new_install_code,spare,spare,new_filename. The installer asks if any additional drivers need to be loaded and loads text mode drivers. If so, they can be loaded from a floppy disk only. There is a hidden feature that shows a screen prompting the user to select a computer type if F5 is pressed during the first message.[9]Text mode drivers are a different from Pn. P drivers as they are loaded regardless if the hardware is present or not. The loading phase of the installer displays some messages on the screen about the current file being loaded. The message is "Setup is loading files ([the file description])..". The files loaded in this phase are those located in sections ending in . Load. In those sections, the key gives a driver name and the value gives a file. The driver name is the looked up in the same section without the . Load suffix to find the driver's user- friendly name. The kernel also needs a registry hive mounted to load the registry from, so SETUPREG. HIV is also loaded. All the file names of the files loaded by the boot loader are hard- coded except for the drivers. As for Pn. P devices, after being identified by a bus driver, the address in checked in the section Hardware. Ids. Database and a corresponding driver name is given. But those are not used in this step. Kernel phase[edit]After all boot files are loaded by the boot loader, the message "Setup is starting Windows" is displayed and the kernel starts. Just like a normal install, it starts the drivers and loads the only service which is setupdd. It runs in kernel mode and starts a GUI still in text mode. From now on, all the drivers are NT based and BIOS interrupts are not used anymore. The user is asked to choose a file system layout. The selected partition is formatted if necessary and the files from TXTSETUP. SIF are copied to the system. Then it creates the registry hives and automatically restart the system so the NT system can start and bootstrap itself. The section Hive. Infs points to the files used to fill the hives with the default values. On a fresh install this section is named Hive. Infs. Fresh. The files are not reg files but are also ini files that can be understood by the ini interpreter bundled with the installer. The disk formatter program is statically linked with setupdd. Remastering[edit]There are many freeware tools available on the internet that customize TXTSETUP. SIF for the creation of unattended installs or to integrate drivers and hotfixes. This process is sometimes referred as slipstreaming. The following command shows how a remastered CD can be created with a minimum set of options on Linux. It assumes that the current directory is the CD mount point. The image will be created at the home directory. Bootable_No. Emulation. N . > ~/ntsetup. The file winnt. sif can be used to make the install unattended but it is not required to be present. There is a model file on the CD named UNATTEND. TXT. Setup tries to detect winnt. I3. 86 directory or on the root directory of a floppy disk.[1. Boot loader phase[edit]For more details on this topic, see NTLDR. Windows NT startup process starts when the computer finds a Windows boot loader, a portion of Windows operating system responsible for finding Microsoft Windows and starting it up. Prior to Windows Vista however, the boot loader was NTLDR. Microsoft has also released operating systems for Intel Itanium processors which use IA- 6. The boot loader of these editions of Windows is IA6. IA6. 4ldr). It is an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) program.[1. Operating system selection[edit]. NTLDR Bootloader's Advanced Option Menu. The boot loader, once executed, searches for a Windows operating system. Windows Boot Manager does so by reading Boot Configuration Data (BCD), a complex firmware- independent database for boot- time configuration data. Its predecessor, NTLDR, does so by reading the simpler boot.
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