Booting Process of Computer System and Its Types

Booting Process of Computer : Cold and Warm Booting in Computer

What is the Booting Process?

The process to ready the computer system for performing any task in known as booting process . From switched ON the computer system up to displaying the operating system prompt, all are the tasks that performed by the booting.
When it is required to perform any task with the computer system, it has to be ready first. The process to make the computer ready is known as booting process .When computer is in ready state, the user can give any command to it and perform the task.

Booting process of computer step by step :

Generally booting includes a number of tasks. These tasks are performed to make the computer system ready. These tasks can be sequenced as:

When the power gets ON, memory testing (RAM test) is performed.
When this is OK, a boot loader program checks all H/W attached with computer system. Such as keyboard, hard disk, CPU, etc.
After listing H/Ws, the boot loader program searches for operating system in secondary storage device. If it found, it calls the main program of operating system and loads operating system into RAM.
After successfully loading the operating system, it operating system prompt. If the operating system is DOS, then the prompt may be A :\>, B :\>, or C :\>. If it is Windows then a desktop is displayed with Start Button.

Types of Booting

Booting can be done is two ways:

Cold Booting or Soft Booting
Warm Booting or Hard Booting

1 .Cold Booting or Soft Booting:

When the power is switched OFF or the computer system OFF or the computer system is shut down and again ON, then cold booting is performed. All steps of booting are performed in this type of booting process.

Warm Booting or Hard booting:

When CTRL, ALT and DEL keys are press simultaneously, and then warm booting is performed. The first step of booting process (memory test 0 is skipped, when this booting is applied. Reset button can also be used for this type of booting.