Hi, Collen.
Is this question going to be on the exam? ;^}
I'll try to say this without trying to write the whole book, but...
The "boot sector" is the key. It's only one sector (512 bytes). It's the
first physical sector on the first active (bootable) partition (typically,
(Drive C:") that the BIOS finds as it boots the computer. The
MS-DOS/Win9x/ME-type boot sector holds a few bytes that tell the computer to
look in the Root of the system partition (C:\) for the files io.sys and
ms-dos.sys, load them into memory, and follow their instructions. The
WinNT/2K/XP-style boot sector doesn't mention io.sys at all, but looks in
C:\ for NTLDR, which finds NTDETECT.COM and boot.ini, and uses those to find
WinXP's "boot folder", wherever you may have installed it.
If that's not enough for you, the entire WinXP Professional Resource Kit
Documentation is online. Try this link for a starting point:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...indows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prork_overview.asp
RC
