COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

HND ICT 2
OPERATING SYSEM
ASSIGNMENT
NAME: SARPONG RICHARD
INDEX NUMBER: 06201219

QUESTION :1

EXPLAIN COMPUTER BOOTING PROCESS WITH REFERENCE TO

THE BOOTSTRAP PROGRAM.

Answer & Explanation

When you first power up a PC, the machine goes through several internal processes before
it's ready for you to use. This is called the boot process, or booting the PC. Boot is short for
bootstrap, a reference to the old adage, "Pull yourself up by the bootstraps," which means to
start something from the very beginning. The boot process is controlled by the PC's basic
input-output system (BIOS).

The BIOS is software stored on a flash memory chip. In a PC, the BIOS is embedded on the
motherboard. Occasionally, a PC manufacturer will release an update for the BIOS, and you
can carefully follow instructions to "flash the BIOS" with the updated software.

Besides controlling the boot process, the BIOS provides a basic configuration interface for
the PC's hardware components. In that interface, you can configure such things as the order to
read drives during boot and how fast the processor should be allowed to run. Check your PC's
documentation to find out how to enter its BIOS interface. This information is often
displayed when you first boot the computer, too, with a message such as, "Press DEL to enter
Set-up Menu."

The following is a summary of the boot process in a PC:

1. The power button activates the power supply in the PC, sending power to the
motherboard and other components.
 2. The PC performs a power-on self-test (POST). The POST is a small computer
program within the BIOS that checks for hardware failures. A single beep after the
POST signals that every thing's okay. Other beep sequences signal a hardware failure,
and PC repair specialists compare these sequences with a chart to determine which
component has failed.

3. The PC displays information on the attached monitor showing details about the boot
process. These include the BIOS manufacturer and revision, processor specks, the
amount of RAM installed, and the drives detected. Many PCs have replaced
displaying this information with a splash screen showing the manufacturer's logo.
You can turn off the splash screen in the BIOS settings if you'd rather see the text.

4. The BIOS attempts to access the first sector of the drive designated as the boot disk.
The first sector is the first kilobytes of the disk in sequence, if the drive is read
sequentially starting with the first available storage address. The boot disk is typically
the same hard disk or solid-state drive that contains your operating system. You can
change the boot disk by configuring the BIOS or interrupting the boot process with a
key sequence (often indicated on the boot screens).

5. The BIOS confirms there's a bootstrap loader, or boot loader, in that first sector of the
boot disk, and it loads that boot loader into memory (RAM). The boot loader is a
small program designed to find and launch the PC's operating system.

6. Once the boot loader is in memory, the BIOS hands over its work to the boot loader,
which in turn begins loading the operating system into memory.

7. When the boot loader finishes its task, it turns control of the PC over to the operating
system. Then, the OS is ready for user interaction.

Step-by-step explanation

Boot sequence

Upon starting, an IBM-compatible personal computer's x86 CPU executes, in real mode, the

instruction located at reset vector (the physical memory address FFFF0h on 16-bit x86
processors and FFFFFFF0h on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors), usually pointing to the
firmware (UEFI or BIOS) entry point inside the ROM. This memory location typically
contains a jump instruction that transfers execution to the location of the firmware
(UEFI or BIOS) start-up program. This program runs a power-on self-test (POST) to check
and initialize required devices such as DRAM and the PCI bus (including running embedded
ROM). The most complicated step is setting up DRAM over SPI, made more difficult by the
fact that at this point memory is very limited.

After initializing required hardware, the firmware (UEFI or BIOS) goes through a pre-
configured list of non-volatile storage devices ("boot device sequence") until it finds one that
is bootable. A bootable MBR device is defined as one that can be read from, and where the
last two bytes of the first sector contain the little-endian word AA55h, found as byte
sequence 55h, AAh on disk (also known as the MBR boot signature), or where it is otherwise
established that the code inside the sector is executable on x86 PCs.

Once the BIOS has found a bootable device it loads the boot sector to linear
address 7C00h (usually segment: offset 0000h:7C00h, but some BIOSes erroneously
use 07C0h:0000h) and transfers execution to the boot code. In the case of a hard disk, this is
referred to as the Master Boot Record (MBR) and is by definition not operating-system
specific. The conventional MBR code checks the MBR's partition table for a partition set
as bootable (the one with active flag set). If an active partition is found, the MBR code loads
the boot sector code from that partition, known as Volume Boot Record (VBR), and executes
it.

The VBR is often operating-system specific; however, in most operating systems its main
function is to load and execute the operating system kernel, which continues start-up.

If there is no active partition, or the active partition's boot sector is invalid, the MBR may
load a secondary boot loader which will select a partition (often via user input) and load its
boot sector, which usually loads the corresponding operating system kernel. In some cases,
the MBR may also attempt to load secondary boot loaders before trying to boot the active
partition. If all else fails, it should issue an INT 18h BIOS interrupt call (followed by an INT
19h just in case INT 18h would return) in order to give back control to the BIOS, which
would then attempt to boot off other devices, attempt a remote boot via network or
invoke ROM BASIC.

Some systems (particularly newer Macintoshes and new editions of Microsoft Windows)

use Intel's EFI. Also core boot allows a computer to boot without having the firmware/BIOS
constantly running in system management mode. 16-bit BIOS interfaces are required by
certain x86 operating systems, such as DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98 (and all when not booted
via UEFI). However, most boot loaders retain 16-bit BIOS call support.

QUESTION :2

WHY IS BOOTSTRAP PROGRAM STORED ON ROM/EPROM BUT

NOT RAM?

The bootstrap loader is stored in the ROM because It is a non-volatile memory meaning that
that the information is not lost when the computer shuts down. In addition is has a small
memory size and is used to only keep permanent data which are necessary to bring about
basic functions i.e. bootstrap loader.