Printer Friendly
Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary
1,762,585,646 visitors served.
forum mailing list For webmasters
?
New: Language forums
Dictionary/
thesaurus
Medical
dictionary
Legal
dictionary
Financial
dictionary
Acronyms
 
Idioms
Encyclopedia
Wikipedia
encyclopedia
?

boot disk
(redirected from Bootdisk)

    Also found in: Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.04 sec.

boot disk

See bootable disk.

(operating system)boot disk - The magnetic disk (usually a hard disk) from which an operating system kernel is loaded (or "bootstrapped"). This second phase in system start-up is performed by a simple bootstrap loader program held in ROM, possibly configured by data stored in some form of writable non-volatile storage.

MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows can be configured (in the BIOS) to try to boot off either floppy disk or hard disk, in either order. By default they first check for the presence of a floppy disk in the drive at start-up and try to use that as a boot disk if present. If no disk is in the drive they then try to boot off the hard disk.

Some operating systems, notably SunOS and Solaris, can be configured to boot from a network rather than from disk. Such a system can thus run as a diskless workstation.


How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content.
?Page tools
Printer friendly
Cite / link
 Email
Feedback
? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
A mirrored bootdisk provides data protection by ensuring the system's storage won't be brought down in the event of a bootdisk failure.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS STORMS NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE MARKET by EDP Weekly's IT Monitor
More results
 
Encyclopedia browser? ? Full browser
 
 
Encyclopedia
?

Disclaimer | Privacy policy | Feedback | Copyright © 2009 Farlex, Inc.
All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. Terms of Use.