The windows xp boot process

This is the info you would typically find in msconfig. It will tell the bootloader which operating system can be found on which partition and its installation path. When working with a dual boot you will see more than one entry. Knowing the installation path is crucial because we need to know the exact location of the ntoskrnl.

Up until Windows 8. User Mode is where we do our day to day tasks in, read our mails, browse the internet, blog, … you know… Kernel Mode is the actual operating system, isolated from User Mode to protect itself from attacks. Game over…. This last file is in charge of scanning the HAL and load the drivers along with the Kernel. Everything that loads before Smss. Session Manager SubSystem Smss. This phase in the boot process is where I have found lots of misconfigurations. Winlogon has to handle a bunch, which usually led to various issues.

Now, you see, services are loaded or being loaded, such as the network stack. If you are domain joined you need to query the DNS of your AD Site to get the SRV record of the nearest domain controller… Not to mention the Computer account still needs to initiate authentication against that domain controller….

You can say this takes a bit of time.. At the same time the userenv. Not to mention, if you had Folder Redirection enabled in your GPOs, folder redirection was simply not applied.. A successful boot is dependent on 3 conditions - the hardware, BIOS and operating system files to function without errors. When an error occurs, you will be notified by error messages, beeping sounds or in the worst scenario, a blank screen.

Back to Top. The bootup process is a list of detailed procedures that the system undergoes to perform all system checks and load all necessary files to bring the computer to an operable state. As soon as you power up your computer, a self-test is performed by the power supply to ensure that the volume and current levels are correct before the Power Good signal is sent to the processor.

When this first stage is cleared, the microprocessor will then trigger the BIOS to perform a series of operations. It first carries out the P. T that performs and verifies all initial hardware checks, such as checking if the system is initialized by a warm or cold start, detecting the presence of peripheral devices and the amount of memory present.

After this, the hardware' firmware will individually carry out its own diagnostic test such as S. The system will now attempt to determine the sequence of devices to load based on the settings stored in the BIOS to start the operating system. It will start by reading from the first bootup device. If it points to the floppy drive, it then searches for a floppy disk. Any link to or advocacy of virus, spyware, malware, or phishing sites.

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Details required : characters remaining Cancel Submit. Restart your system and it will boot just fine, but you will have two events in the Event Viewer System log:. Then reboot into the Recovery Console and put in a "corrupt" drvmain.

Reboot normally and XP will boot just fine with the same two messages in the Event Viewer System log and a third message:. So you have verified that XP will boot just fine if the drvmain. The problem with troubleshooting the message is nobody tells any details about how the system got into this condition in the first place - what happened prior to the incident of not booting?

Editing the registry will not help - unless you edited the registry beforehand and messed it up somehow. Running fixmbr will not help since there are no symptoms indicating a missing or corrupt MBR and the Microsoft engaged Support Engineer "expert" fails to warn that if your system has a built in Recovery Partition from the factory, you will not be able to use it after running fixmbr.

These are just more of their wild goose chases when they have no idea what the problem is or how to fix it. There is something else wrong and without knowing what happened prior or any other system details all you can do is start guessing and trying things, or pursuing wild goose chases and I tend not to waste time on such things.

Thank you in advance for your help, and hopefully someone here can shed some light on this! This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread.

I have the same question 7. Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit. Srimadhwa B. Hi, I would suggest you to refer to these links and check.

How satisfied are you with this reply? Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. In reply to Srimadhwa B's post on August 25, Srimadhwa B, Thank you very much for your reply-- I greatly appreciate your taking some of your time to attempt to try and assist me. Instead, I am starting to suspect that one of three things might be causing my problem here: A damaged NTFS file system, which would prevent Ntldr and Ntoskrnl.

The system files Ntldr or Ntoskrnl. This is because the boot process would most likely fail long before the kernel started loading the device drivers if these two crucial system files were borked in any way. I may have a seriously messed up Windows registry. Maybe the entry in the registry for the drvmain. Unfortunately, I have not been able to look into this possibility yet since I have yet to figure out how to view and edit my laptop's Windows registry from the Windows XP Recovery Console.

If anyone out there knows a good way to do this, I would definitely be interested in learning how. In reply to Hoagiebot's post on August 26, This is a peculiar problem John E. Sincerely, John. In reply to John E. XP will boot just fine if the drvmain.