INSTALL WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL FROM A MASTER IMAGEIN THIS EXERCISE, Y...

4-5Lesson 1 Explaining the Startup Process

Hardware Detection

NTDETECT.COM and NTOSKRNL.EXE perform hardware detection. NTDETECT.COM

executes after you select Windows XP Professional on the Please Select The Operating

System To Start screen (or after the timer times out).

Note If you select an operating system other than Windows XP Professional (such as Win-

dows 98), NTLDR loads and executes BOOTSECT.DOS, which is a copy of the boot sector that

was on the system partition at the time Windows XP Professional was installed. Passing exe-

cution to BOOTSECT.DOS starts the boot process for the selected operating system.

NTDETECT.COM collects a list of currently installed hardware components and

r e t u r n s t h i s l i s t t o N T L D R f o r l a t e r i n c l u s i o n i n t h e R e g i s t r y u n d e r t h e

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE key.

NTDETECT.COM detects the following components:

■

Bus/adapter type

■

Communication ports

■

Floating-point coprocessor

■

Floppy disks

■

Keyboard

■

Mouse/pointing device

■

Parallel ports

■

SCSI adapters

■

Video adapters

Configuration Selection

After NTLDR starts loading Windows XP Professional and collects hardware informa-

tion, the operating system loader presents you with the Hardware Profile/Configura-

tion Recovery menu, which contains a list of the hardware profiles that are set up on

the computer. The first hardware profile is highlighted. You can press the

DOWN

arrow key to select another profile. You also can press L to invoke the Last Known

Good configuration.

If there is only a single hardware profile, NTLDR does not display the Hardware Pro-

file/Configuration Recovery menu and loads Windows XP Professional using the

default hardware profile configuration.

Troubleshooting the Boot Sequence

There are a number of problems that can occur during the boot sequence, including

the following:

Missing or corrupt boot files If the NTLDR, BOOT.INI, BOOTSECT.DOS, NTDE-

TECT.COM, or NTOSKRNL.EXE files become corrupt or are missing, you see an error

message indicating the situation, and Windows startup fails. You should use the Recov-

ery Console (described in Lesson 3) to restore the files.

Improperly configured BOOT.INI An improperly configured BOOT.INI file gener-

ally results from an error while manually editing the file or from a change to disk con-

figuration. It is also possible for the BOOT.INI file to become corrupt or missing. In this

case, you should use the Recovery Console to restore the files.

Improperly configured hardware NTDETECT.COM can fail during its detection of

hardware if a hardware device is incorrectly configured, a bad driver is installed, or the

device is malfunctioning. If startup fails during hardware detection, you should begin

troubleshooting hardware by removing unnecessary devices from the computer and

adding them back one at a time until you discover the source of the problem. You can

also try the Last Known Good configuration if you suspect that a new configuration or

driver is at fault.

What Is the BOOT.INI File?

When you install Windows XP Professional on a computer, Windows Setup saves the

BOOT.INI file in the active partition. NTLDR uses information in the BOOT.INI file to

display the boot loader screen, from which you select the operating system to start.

The BOOT.INI file includes two sections, [boot loader] and [operating systems], which

contain information that NTLDR uses to create the Boot Loader Operating System

Selection menu. A typical BOOT.INI might contain the following lines:

[boot loader]timeout=30default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS[operating systems]multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fast-detectmulti(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT=”Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00”multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\ WINNT=”Windows NT Server Workstation 4.00 [VGA mode]” /basevideo /sosC:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT=”Microsoft Windows Recovery Console” /cmdcons

The [operating systems] section of a BOOT.INI file that is created during a default instal-

lation of Windows XP Professional contains a single entry for Windows XP Profes-

sional. If your computer is a Windows 95–based or Windows 98–based dual-boot