Boot.ini

NTLDR (abbreviation of NT loader) is the boot loader for all releases of Windows NT operating system up to and including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. NTLDR is typically run from the primary hard disk drive, but it can also run from portable storage devices such as a CD-ROM, USB flash drive, or floppy disk. NTLDR can also load a non NT-based operating system given the appropriate boot sector in a file.

NTLDR requires, at the minimum, the following two files to be on the system volume:

An additional important file is boot.ini, which contains boot configuration (if missing, NTLDR will default to \Windows on the first partition of the first hard drive).

NTLDR is launched by the volume boot record of system partition, which is typically written to the disk by the Windows FORMAT or SYS command.

Windows NT was originally designed for ARC-compatible platforms, relying on its boot manager support and providing only osloader.exe, a loading program accepting ordinary command-line arguments specifying Windows directory partition, location or boot parameters, which is launched by ARC-compatible boot manager when a user chooses to start specific Windows NT operating system. But because the x86 lacked any of the ARC support, the additional layer was added specifically for that platform: custom boot manager code presenting text menu allowing the user to choose from one or more operating system and its options configured in boot.ini configuration file, prepended by special StartUp module which is responsible for some preparations such as switching the CPU to the protected mode. When a user chooses an operating system from the boot menu, the following command-line arguments are then passed to the part of the osloader.exe common to all processor architectures:

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