Exercise 1 STUDY OF BOOTING PROCESS

Date:

Question: Understand the Booting Process of the LINUX /Windows and answer the following
questions:

Linux Boot Process

Press the power button on your system, and after few moments you see the Linux login prompt.

Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes from the time you press the power
button until the Linux login prompt appears?

The following are the 6 high level stages of a typical Linux boot process.

BIOS Basic Input/Output System

executes MBR

MBR Master Boot Record executes

GRUB

GRUB Grand Unified Bootloader

executes Kernel

KERNEL Kernel executes /sbin/init

INIT Init executes run level

programs

RUNLEVEL Runlevel programs are

executed from /etc/rc.d/rc*.d/

1. BIOS
  BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System
 Performs some system integrity checks
 Searches, loads, and executes the boot loader program.
 It looks for boot loader in floppy, cd-rom, or hard drive. You can press a key (typically
F12 of F2, but it depends on your system) during the BIOS startup to change the boot
sequence.
 Once the boot loader program is detected and loaded into the memory, BIOS gives the
control to it.
 So, in simple terms BIOS loads and executes the MBR boot loader.

2. MBR

 MBR stands for Master Boot Record.

 It is located in the 1st sector of the bootable disk. Typically /dev/hda, or /dev/sda
 MBR is less than 512 bytes in size. This has three components 1) primary boot loader
info in 1st 446 bytes 2) partition table info in next 64 bytes 3) mbr validation check in last
2 bytes.
 It contains information about GRUB (or LILO in old systems).
 So, in simple terms MBR loads and executes the GRUB boot loader.

3. GRUB

 GRUB stands for Grand Unified Bootloader.

 If you have multiple kernel images installed on your system, you can choose which one
to be executed.
 GRUB displays a splash screen, waits for few seconds, if you don’t enter anything, it
loads the default kernel image as specified in the grub configuration file.
 GRUB has the knowledge of the filesystem (the older Linux loader LILO didn’t
understand filesystem).
 Grub configuration file is /boot/grub/grub.conf (/etc/grub.conf is a link to this).
 So, in simple terms GRUB just loads and executes Kernel and initrd images.

It loads the kernel in 3 stages.

GRUB stage 1: 

 The primary boot loader takes up less than 512 bytes of disk space in the MBR - too
small a space to contain the instructions necessary to load a complex operating system. 
 Instead the primary boot loader performs the function of loading either the stage 1.5 or
stage 2 boot loader.

GRUB Stage 1.5: 

 Stage 1 can load the stage 2 directly, but it is normally set up to load the stage 1.5. 
 This can happen when the /boot partition is situated beyond the 1024 cylinder head of the
hard drive. 
  GRUB Stage 1.5 is located in the first 30 KB of Hard Disk immediately after MBR and
before the first partition.
 This space is utilized to store file system drivers and modules.
 This enabled stage 1.5 to load stage 2 to load from any known location on the file system
i.e. /boot/grub

GRUB Stage 2:

 This is responsible for loading kernel from /boot/grub/grub.conf and any other
modules needed
 Loads a GUI interface i.e. splash image located at /grub/splash.xpm.gz with list
of available kernels where you can manually select the kernel or else after the default
timeout value the selected kernel will boot

4. Kernel

This can be considered the heart of operating system responsible for handling all system
processes.

 Mounts the root file system as specified in the “root=” in grub.conf

 Kernel executes the /sbin/init program
 Since init was the 1st program to be executed by Linux Kernel, it has the process id (PID)
of 1. Do a ‘ps -ef | grep init’ and check the pid.
 initrd stands for Initial RAM Disk.
 initrd is used by kernel as temporary root file system until kernel is booted and the real
root file system is mounted. It also contains necessary drivers compiled inside, which
helps it to access the hard drive partitions, and other hardware.

Kernel is loaded in the following stages:

1. Kernel as soon as it is loaded configures hardware and memory allocated to the system.
2. Next it uncompresses the initrd image (compressed using zlib into  zImage or bzImage
formats) and mounts it and loads all the necessary drivers.
3. Loading and unloading of kernel modules is done with the help of programs like insmod,
and rmmod present in the initrd image.
4. Looks out for hard disk types be it a LVM or RAID.
5. Unmounts initrd image and frees up all the memory occupied by the disk image.
6. Then kernel mounts the root partition as specified in grub.conf as read-only.
7. Next it runs the init process
5. Init

 Looks at the /etc/inittab file to decide the Linux run level.

 Following are the available run levels
o 0 – halt
o 1 – Single user mode
o 2 – Multiuser, without NFS
o 3 – Full multiuser mode
o 4 – unused
o 5 – X11
o 6 – reboot
 Init identifies the default initlevel from /etc/inittab and uses that to load all appropriate
program.
 Execute ‘grep initdefault /etc/inittab’ on your system to identify the default run level
 If you want to get into trouble, you can set the default run level to 0 or 6. Since you know
what 0 and 6 means, probably you might not do that.
 Typically you would set the default run level to either 3 or 5.

6. Runlevel programs

 When the Linux system is booting up, you might see various services getting started. For
example, it might say “starting sendmail …. OK”. Those are the runlevel programs,
executed from the run level directory as defined by your run level.
 Depending on your default init level setting, the system will execute the programs from
one of the following directories.
o Run level 0 – /etc/rc.d/rc0.d/
o Run level 1 – /etc/rc.d/rc1.d/
o Run level 2 – /etc/rc.d/rc2.d/
o Run level 3 – /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/
o Run level 4 – /etc/rc.d/rc4.d/
o Run level 5 – /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/
o Run level 6 – /etc/rc.d/rc6.d/
 Please note that there are also symbolic links available for these directory under /etc
directly. So, /etc/rc0.d is linked to /etc/rc.d/rc0.d.
 Under the /etc/rc.d/rc*.d/ directories, you would see programs that start with S and K.
 Programs starts with S are used during startup. S for startup.
 Programs starts with K are used during shutdown. K for kill.
 There are numbers right next to S and K in the program names. Those are the sequence
number in which the programs should be started or killed.
 For example, S12syslog is to start the syslog deamon, which has the sequence number of
12. S80sendmail is to start the sendmail daemon, which has the sequence number of 80.
So, syslog program will be started before sendmail.

There you have it. That is what happens during the Linux boot process.
QUESTIONS

1. What is meant by booting?

2. How to check the current runlevel details of your system?

3. Torvalds, Wrote most of the Linux Kernel in C++ programming Language, do you agree?

4. To which runlevel linux boot by default?

5. What is initrd image and what is its function in the linux booting process ?

6. What are the run levels in linux and how to change them ?

7. Explain the terms suid, sgid and sticky bit ?

8. Explain briefly the procedure for re-installing Grub in Linux ?

9. How do you boot your system into the following modes, when you are in some trouble ?
A. Rescue mode
B. Single user mode
C. Emergency mode
Booting procedure of Windows operating system
Every day we are using an operating system and most specifically a Windows operating system
but most of us are not aware of the process or procedures involved in the starting of Windows.
Here we are going to learn the step by step processes involved in the booting procedure of a
Windows operating system.

Functions of BIOS
The first process starting when you turn on your computer is BIOS i.e, Basic Input Output
System. BIOS has two functions, to conduct POST and read MBR.

a) POST - POST stands for Power On Self Test. POST checks all the hardware devices
connected to a computer like RAM, hard disk etc and make sure that the system can run
smoothly with those hardware devices. If the POST is a failure the system halts with a beep
sound.
b) Now BIOS checks the boot priority. We can set the boot priority as CD drive, hard disk or
floppy drive.
c) MBR - The next duty of BIOS is to read the MBR. MBR stands for Master Boot Record and
its the first sector on a hard disk. MBR
contains the partition table and boot loader.
Functions of Boot loader
Now BIOS has passed the control to boot loader and boot loader is a small program which loads
kernel to computers memory. Actually there are two stages of boot loaders, stage 1 boot loader
and stage 2 boot loader. MBR contains the stage 1 boot loader and stage 1 boot loader is a link to
the stage 2 boot loader. The stage 2 boot loader resides in the boot partition and it loads the
kernel to memory.

Boot files and functions

There are three boot files in a Windows operating system and they are NTLDR,
NTDETECT.COM and Boot.ini. The boot files are found in the active partition of hard disk and
its normally C drive in a Windows machine.

NTLDR- NTLDR stands for NT Loader and its the second stage bootloader. The path of
NTLDR is C:\Windows\i386\NTLDR.
Boot.ini- Boot.ini contains the configuration files of NTLDR. When the operating system is
loaded we cannot pass any arguments to kernal, so those arguments are passed through boot.ini.
You can edit boot.ini by opening through notepad. The path of Boot.ini is C:\boot.ini.
NTDETECT.COM- This file detect hardware's and passes information to NTLDR. Using the
collected information the NTLDR creates a hardware key and this key is used to detect
hardware's. A new hardware key is generated after each reboot of the operating system and that's
why system asks to reboot after installation of a new hardware. The hardware keys created by
NTLDR can be found in Windows registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> HARDWARES.

Kernel and its functions

After executing the functions of boot files the control is passed to Kernel. ntoskrnal.exe is the
kernel file in a Windows machine and its path is C:\Windows\system 32\ntoskrnal.exe. Kernel
acts as a layer between software and hardware. The library file hal.dll
(C;\Windows\system32\hal.dll) helps Kernel to interact with hardware's. HAL stands for
Hardware Abstraction Layer and this hal.dll file is machine specific. Now the drivers for
hardware's are loaded from the file C:\Windows\system32\config\system and the Kernel is
loaded to primary memory.

Services and log in procedure

When kernel is loaded in the primary memory services for each process is started and the registry
entry for those services can be found at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE - System - Current control
set - Services.
Winlogon.exe (C:\Windows\system32\winlogon.exe) is the last service started during this
process. Winlogon.exe starts the log in procedures of windows machine. It first calls the library
file msgina.dll (C:\Windows\system32\msgina.dll).
MSGINA stands for Microsoft Graphics Identification and Authentication and it provides the log
in window. Now msginal.dll passes the control to LSA (Local Security Authority), it verifies the
username and password from the SAM file. SAM (Security Accounts Manager) contains the
information about all users created in a Windows operating system.
Now the booting procedure is over and we have reached the desktop of Windows operating
system.

QUESTIONS

1. Which file must be located in the root folder of the Active Partition for Dual Booting of
Windows XP and Windows ME to boot?
2. Very frequently, users in your office put floppy disks in the drives and forget to take them out.
This results in boot-up problems and results in support requests. How would you stop this
computer from looking in the A: drive for boot files first.
3. If, upon Booting up a Computer, you see the error message “Keyboard Error…” What do you
think could be the problem?
4. If, upon booting up a PC, you see a message which says “Invalid Drive Configuration..”
What do you think is causing this?
5. What is the command to start Windows System Restore from the Command Line?

Sl No: Assessment Process Description Mark(s)

1 Precise answering 5

2 Explanation 5
Total(10) 10
Remarks

Date of Completion: Signature

Result: