When your PC is first powered up, a lot happens. Through standardized calls to the BIOS (“interrupts” in computer parlance), the operating system can trigger the BIOS to read and write to the disk and interface with other hardware components. The BIOS is the lowest level of software that interfaces with the hardware as a whole, 2 and is the interface by means of which the bootloader and operating system kernel can communicate with and control the hardware. The BIOS code is baked into the motherboard of your PC, usually stored on what is called an EEPROM 1 and is considerably hardware-specific. The BIOS is where hardware meets software for the first time, and where all the boot magic begins.
The implementations of each component can differ greatly depending on your hardware and operating system, but the rules they follow and the process by which they work are always the same. In the diagram below, the boot sequence for all standard computers and operating systems is shown:Īs you can see, the boot process is broken down into several major components, each of which is a completely-separate subsystem with many different options and variations.
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