What is Boot, Booting and Bootable Devices?

Here’s the story of a technical word called BOOT, normally we use this word to describe ‘startup’ in our computer system and it can our computer’s bios or maybe our system’s hard drive etc.




Mainly this word “Boot” comes from the word Bootstrapping and this bootstrapping term originally appears in early 19th century in the United States.

So, Let’s Talk More About Bootstrapping:

In a general language, bootstrapping mainly refer to a self-starting process of your computer which doesn’t need any external input command to perform itself. So, in technical language people starts to using the word called booting for this whole loading the software to the memory process and the word booting become quite famous instead using the word bootstrapping.

All About How Booting Works:

In your computer system, the whole booting process is performed by the chip called BIOS Chip and this is the only chip in your computer who is responsible for the whole system startup process from when you push the power button to the operating system startup.

Normally this booting process takes around 10 seconds which involves accomplishing a POST, finding and preparing peripheral devices, and then finding and loading an operating system. The process of hibernating or sleeping of your computer does not involve booting.

Suggestion Link>> What Is Computer BIOS And Why PC’s Need It?




Booting Process Explain:

When you push the power button of your computer, it boot’s the motherboard’s BIOS Chip and after that, your system bios starts a short time POST service.

POST means power-on self-tests, it starts by checking the BIOS chip and then tests the CMOS RAM, if the POST can’t find any CMOS battery failure then it continuous to initialize the CPU and then checking every external or internal connected hardware parts like mouse, keyboard, ram, hard disk etc. to ensure that they all are working properly together.

To boot a computer system successfully, its BIOS, operating system, and hardware components must all be working accurately, if any one of these got failed then it’s 100% possibilities to get the system boot failure error on the computer’s screen.

After when the power-on self-tests completes, the bios typically looks to the CMOS chip to tell it, where to find the Operating System, then CMOS look for the appropriate boot drive to find the OS’s boot record and when the CMOS found it, the bios starts to load the boot loader to starts your operating system.

A Boot Loader is a computer program which is responsible for managing and starting an operating system software of the computer after when the power-on self-tests gets completed.

Once the bios initialize the operating system, it starts to copy its files into the computer memory and after that, the Operating System basically takes control over the whole booting process.

What Is Bootable Device?

In a computer language, a bootable device a storage device where boot loader is located and have a free access for your bios to compile it, in a normal language a bootable device is a part of computer hardware that can read or contains the files required for a computer to start.

So, if you having a blank hard disk that doesn’t mean it is bootable but when you installed an operating system in it then it becomes bootable because now your bios can read the boot loader files to make the OS’s or some software to start.

Suggestion Link>> How To Change the Boot Order (Boot Sequence) in BIOS ?

Conclusion

I think now you’ve enough knowledge about what is boot and how system startup becomes booting and why we call our hard disk bootable kind of stuffs and basically it’s all about staring the computer or maybe starting something in the computer, that’s the reason why we need to make our pen drive bootable before booting it into our computer, or otherwise it won’t boot.



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