3 ms·
Turtles all the way down. Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.
by matchagaucho 4y ago
Turtles all the way down.
Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.
- microsoftdoes 4y agoNot true since the Win 9x days.
- jesprenj 4y agoWas 2000 already NT and free of DOS?
- Cockbrand 4y agoYes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000 was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market, though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS based on NT.
- indigodaddy 4y agoI used Win2000 as my main desktop for about 3-4 years back in the day. Very stable.
- adra 4y agoI used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.
- agumonkey 4y agoPC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was). It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.
- vel0city 4y agoWindows 2000 was an NT release, but Windows Millenium Edition (Me) was the last generally released DOS-based desktop OS released by Microsoft. Windows Me was released after Windows 2000 by a few months.
- jesprenj 4y agoRight, I meant to ask for Me, as it was after 9x and still DOS, or?
- sebazzz 4y agoMaybe pre-UEFI, but the UEFI boot process is completely different.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoMS-DOS has never been used in Windows NT and its descendant operation systems to support booting. Prior to Windows Vista the real mode code in the MBR loads NTLDR[0] which switches to protected mode and runs osloader.exe to boot the kernel. Post-Vista this is handled by the BOOTMGR[1] bootloader. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_NT_since_Vista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_NT_...
- matchagaucho 4y agoWindows NT and the systems based on it are not based on MS-DOS, but use a virtual machine, NTVDM, to handle the DOS API. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API Games like Doom still run on Windows because of this DOS virtualization.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoIndeed, which has nothing to do with booting.
- helloooooooo 4y agoNo it doesn’t. UEFI boots into bootmgr.efi, which loads up winload, which loads either ntoskrnl or hyperv
- userbinator 4y agoThat's only true of the lineage commonly known as "9x" that actually started at Windows/386 and ended with Windows Me. Those OSs are actually hypervisors that "hyperjack" MS-DOS when booted and then run DOS and the "user mode" of Windows in VMs. The NT line has always been distinct from that and is a traditional OS architecture.