By Ian Shields. When you turn on a computer or restart it, the computer must load an operating system before you can do any useful work. This process is called booting the computer. The computer pulls itself up by the bootstraps, using a boot loader. Some aspects of the boot process are common to most systems, but some hardware-related aspects are specific to a particular architecture. The material in this tutorial is directed specifically at x86 and x86_64 architecture systems using BIOS to boot the system. A newer system using Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and the GUID Partition Table (GPT) was developed for the Intel Itanium and IA64 architectures to overcome several limitations of the 16-bit x86 BIOS architecture, especially for the large servers that Itanium was intended for. Intel stopped developing EFI in 2005 at version 1.10 and contributed it to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum, which now manages it as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). UEFI is gaining popularity, particularly for systems having drives larger than 2TB in size. It is also required for computers running Windows® 8.

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