NTLDR - History

History

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:

load osloader=\System32\NTLDR systempartition= osloadpartition= osloadoptions= consolein=multi(0)key(0)keyboard(0) consoleout=multi(0)video(0)monitor(0) x86systempartition=

In Windows versions starting from Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, NTLDR has been split off back to its boot manager and system loader parts: the Windows Boot Manager and winload.exe. Being boot manager part completely rewritten, it no longer uses boot.ini as a configuration file, although the bootcfg utility for modifying boot.ini is still present for the case of multi-boot configurations with Windows versions up to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

The bootsect.exe utility program in the Windows PE tools has options /nt52 (NTLDR) and /nt60 (Vista) to store a NTLDR or Vista boot record in the first sector of a specified partition.

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