Boot disk

A bootable or bootable media (short boot media ) is a storage medium comprising one or more computer platforms the necessary content to allow a start of it.

Such a medium may be, for example:

  • CD -ROM and other optical storage media - application examples include the installation CD or the live CD
  • Disk - on some systems this is a boot loader prerequisite
  • EEPROM or Flash EEPROM - mostly in embedded systems
  • Hard drive and partition - on some systems this is a boot loader prerequisite
  • Network adapter - not in itself a storage medium, but can the Bootstrap protocol and / or PXE will also initiate a boot process: " Network Boot "
  • USB mass storage devices - such as USB sticks

Whether a computer actually boot from a specific storage medium (English boot ) can or not depends first of all on whether the medium or the reader can be (eg drive) also connected to the computer. However, it also depends heavily on the integrated firmware of the computer, whether it supports the media and its connection (eg via USB) as the starting medium. At IBM PCs with BIOS firmware as can be, for example, usually in the BIOS setup to configure which media are tried in the order, called " boot order ". On Macintosh systems, the starting medium to be used can be set via the firmware or select once by holding the ⌥ key (option) after turning on the computer.

It is also possible to have more than one operating system installed on a single physical storage medium to accommodate (→ multi-boot system ). In need of a boot loader systems (especially computers with BIOS) is then an additional configuration or installation of a boot manager needed to select the desired operating system to start can. On systems with a different firmware to start the operating system can be selected usually directly over the firmware ( Open Firmware UEFI ).

For the repair, but also for other purposes serve media (eg, as an ISO image) are more or less freely available mostly as a memory dump. Also applications, especially in the backup and computer security application that bootable media offer that can be created partly later (English boot media builder ), but sometimes the same as the installation CD.

→ See also: applications of live systems

  • Digital storage medium
Booting CD-ROM Floppy disk Preboot Execution Environment Information security
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