Booting – What is it and How do I accomplish it?
July 1st, 2010
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Posted by Tim under Guest Blogger, How To, Tech Talk
Today we have a guest Blogger by the name of Keith taking over the blog’s helm. Keith is a computer technician living in Vancouver, Canada who hosts a blog, “Computer Repair Vancouver”, where he discusses a variety of computing related issues. I hope you enjoy today’s content as much as I did. It’s never to late to go back to basics.
During a conversation with a technologically knowledgeable friend or while perusing an Internet forum you may have been introduced to a rather obscure computing term: booting. What, you thought to yourself, are they talking about? This reaction is common and understandable as booting is something that the average computer user rarely needs to think about. In fact, modern PCs almost always handle it for you.
Nonetheless, let’s look at what this term means and when we would need to deal with it personally. When a computer is first powered on it basically knows nothing; its memory is completely blank. Consequently, it needs directions on where to look for information about how to start up properly. By default, your computer is hard wired to look for these directions on your hard drive (the device which stores all of your files); in computer terminology, it is told to boot from your hard drive. There are times, however, when you want your computer to look for directions on starting up somewhere else.
The most common reason for booting from a device other than your hard drive is if you are trying to run a program which requires complete computer access. For example, some virus removal programs want to scan every single inch of your hard drive. Therefore, they don’t want your hard drive to be in use when they are scanning (since this would prevent them from checking certain areas of it). One way to get around this problem is to put the virus removal software on a CD and then boot from the CD. Since you are booting from a CD, your computer looks to the CD for startup information; it does not touch the hard drive.
From here, the virus removal program can take control of the situation and perform the scan.
Let’s say you have downloaded a specialty program which requires itself to be booted from a CD. What would you do? Well, first of all you need to put the program onto a CD using a CD burning program.
Initially, you may try to run the program from within Microsoft Windows; however, you would soon see that nothing happens. This is because the booting process occurs before your operating system (Windows) has even loaded. As a result, you would need to restart your computer and look for the word “boot” or “booting” as your system loads up. As soon as you saw either of these two terms you would press the keyboard key listed beside it. This would take you to the boot menu. The boot menu is exactly what it sounds like, a menu where you can choose which device your computer will use to start up. Since we want to boot off of a CD, we would select the CD option and hit enter.
After a few seconds we would see the program on the CD start up and we could proceed as necessary. It is important to note that when you boot off a device other than your hard drive you likely will be presented with something that looks quite different from your usual desktop.
This is the general idea of what it means to boot. If you have any questions regarding this concept visit us at Computer Repair Vancouver and ask away. Additionally, if you would like to see a real world example of when you would change your booting device take a look at our tutorial on using DBAN to securely wipe a hard drive.
