What Happens When You Start Your Computer

This section describes what happens when you start a computer that has a Windows NT installed as one of the operating systems. In general, this section describes what happens at each step in the process when the computer successfully starts. Chapter 6, "Troubleshooting Startup and Disk Problems," discusses what you can do to isolate startup problems and how to recover from them.

These are the steps involved in the successful startup of Windows NT:

• Power On Self Test (POST) processing
• Initial startup process
• Boot loader process
• Selecting the operating system
• Detecting hardware
• Selecting a configuration
• Loading the Kernel
• Initializing the Kernel
• Logging on

The order and the processing is somewhat different, depending upon the hardware platform (x86-based computer or RISC-based computer).

The startup process begins when you:

• Power on the computer.
• Click Shutdown and Restart on the Shutdown Computer dialog box.
• Select Restart the computer from the Shut Down Windows dialog box.

When you see the Begin Logon dialog box, with the text Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to log on, your computer has completed the loading of Windows NT, and has completed much of the initialization. However, startup is complete only when a user can successfully log on at the Begin Logon dialog box.

Windows NT might not start up or operate correctly if any hardware components do not initialize correctly. Startup fails if any of the files required to start Windows NT are not present in the correct folder, or if one of the files has been corrupted. Table 3.6 describes the files that x86-based computers and RISC-based computers use to start Windows NT.

Table 3.6 Files required to start up Windows NT