Troubleshooting the boot process
by mota
This page is a work in progress. Please help me improve it by pointing out errors and omissions. Also by letting me know of any authoritative resources on this topic. Please, I'm begging you: email me! mota@freenode-windows.org
We see quite a few questions related to the boot up process (especially in multi-boot scenarios). So I thought it would be a good idea to start a page on troubleshooting it.
Because I think that the best troubleshooting tool is an understanding of how things work, I will start with a flowchart that gives an overview of the complex and hacky boot process. This first draft covers only the Windows MBR-type boot process. Later I hope to add information covering GRUB, LILO, and UEFI/GPT processes.
Resources:
Gustavo Duartes: How computers boot up
Pádraig Brady: Details of GRUB on the PC
Simon Kitching: Booting Linux on x86 using Grub2
Wikipedia: Master boot record
Links I have collected but not yet fully assimilated:
Microsoft: Modify the BCD Store Template
Microsoft: BCDEdit Command-Line Options
Microsoft: Bitlocker hardware and software requirements
Microsoft: How Windows 2000 Assigns, Reserves, and Stores Drive Letters
Microsoft: Order in Which MS-DOS and Windows Assign Drive Letters
Microsoft: Windows NT Boot Process and Hard Disk Constraints
Microsoft: Intel x86bBased system boot sequence and files
Microsoft: Troubleshooting the startup process
Microsoft: The Windows 7 Boot Process (sbsl)
Microsoft: Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8
UEFI.org: Windows Boot Environment (discusses windows boot sequence under UEFI)
Ubuntuforums: Grub Basic Troubleshooting Checkpoints/Flow Chart
Erich Boleyn: GRUB Technical Info
Steve Litt: Grub From the Ground Up
Oracle: GRUB Based Booting (Reference) (really these are old solaris docs)
Gnu: GRUB Manual 1.99 (far more of a howto than a technical 'how it works' doc)
Ubuntu.com: Grub2
Wikipedia: Windows Vista startup process
Stoic Joker: Understanding the Boot Process
Paul Krzyzanowski: Booting an Operating System
Intel: EFI and UEFI
Wikipedia: Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
Mark Russinovich: Fixing Disk Signature Collisions
Overclock.net: Windows: The Startup and Shutdown Process