What do you understand by booting of a computer? What are the main activities that are carried out by a computer during booting?

Booting of Computer

In modern PC refers to the initial set of process that PC does when it is powered ON. When power is turned ON, control is transferred automatically to address FFFFO by hardware. This location is in ROM and contains a jump to boot strap procedure in the BIOS ROM. The boot strap procedure carries out some hardware tests and if the machine passes the test, it tries to read the boot sector from diskette A. If no diskette is present in drive A, the primary boot sector of hard disk is read in. The primary table in primary boot sector tells the where the partition are and which one is active. The active partition is read and then executed. The boot sector reads its own root directory to see if io.sys and msdos.sys are present. If so it reads then both into memory and transfers control to io.sys. Once loaded io.sys calls BIOS procedures to initialise the hardware. Then sysinit program is executed and reads config.sys to configure the system.