Chapter 19 - What Happens When You Start Your Computer

This chapter describes what happens when you start a computer that has a Windows NT installed as one of the operating systems. In general, this chapter describes what happens at each step in the process when the computer successfully starts. Chapter 21, "Troubleshooting Startup and Disk Problems," discusses what you can do to isolate startup problems, and how to recover from them.

This chapter also describes dual-booting and triple-booting other operating systems, such as Windows 95 and MS-DOS. It provides information about the contents of the Boot.ini file on x86-based computers, and describes the firmware menus and how to use them on RISC-based computers.