topic Re: win & bootloaders in Operating System - Microsoft

win & bootloaders

Sharfuddin — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 21:34:03 GMT

what are the names of bootloader does win98, win2k and xp installs in the MBR ???
I heard that in win 2k there is NTLDR, which is a bootloader, and resides in MBR of harddisk... is it true???

Re: win & bootloaders

Roger Faucher — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 22:03:13 GMT

NTLDR is a hidden, system file in the root directory of the boot partition. It does not however, exist in the MBR. The MBR is essentially a pointer to the location of the NTLDR (for NT, WIN2K, and WINXP). WIN9x and WINMe don't use the NTLDR file, instead they use a file named COMMAND.COM and two other files named CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT (just like DOS).

HTH

Roger

Re: win & bootloaders

Maaz — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 00:04:01 GMT

it means that Windows(2k,xp etc) place/install nothing in MBR, as Linux place its bootloaders(grub, lilo) in MBR. ???

Re: win & bootloaders

Roger Faucher — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:02:00 GMT

See if this helps:

http://www.ntfs.com/mbr-damaged.htm

Roger

Re: win & bootloaders

Jon Finley — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 01:31:55 GMT

With MS-DOS, the MBR pointer to IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS - They in turn then loaded COMMAND.COM as the command interpreter.

Win95/98 still use IO.SYS, but have changed MSDOS.SYS into a settings file, controlling what the OS loads at boot (GUI yes or no, smartdrive, network, etc). You can open MSDOS.SYS using notepad to look at but don't change the settings.

With NT/2000/XP, the MBR points to: NTLDR which in turn reads boot.ini, fires off, ntdetect and system32\ntoskrnl.exe - others follow from there.

Jon

Re: win & bootloaders

Roger Faucher — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 10:14:26 GMT

Thanks Jon:

I felt like I was leaving something out. I just had another birthday celebration; maybe some more brain cells died. ;-)

Roger