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: Definitions for system volume and boot volume

• Microsoft: What are system partitions and boot partitions?

• 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

  • Microsoft: Windows On/Off Transition Performance Analysis

  • 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