VMWare Inc Interview Question
Quality Assurance EngineersTeam: QATeam
Country: India
Interview Type: In-Person
once you press the power button the laptop power button the CPU initializes itself from some clock trigger and then if the battery power is enough it then proceeds and checks systems ROM BIOS to look for startup functions and instructions it then checks the POST check(power on self-test) and then again checks the power and continues to check the HDD, cd, floppy disks and other perpheral devices connected to it. it then checks the os line for it boot up we can select the boot sequence and then go ahead for it. then if your laptop has both unix and windows then the grub get loaded and then on we can select the boot loader.
When we press the power button the following thing happen in sequence:
1. POST : First thing that happen is the Power on Self Test. The computer checks the power condition each and every component.
2. After that BIOS is loaded which is tell the system about the date, time, boot devices, boot location (sector address of Master boot Record i.e. MBR), checks for input/Output/Memory Devices and their connectivity.
3 After getting the address of boot device. It starts loading the Master Boot Record from Secondary to Primary Memory.
4. After that it tries to execute the available device drivers.
5. Now the system is booted it is ready for User to use.
Read the blog duartes.org/gustavo/blog/category/internals/page/2 which gives quite a handfull of insight of How computer boots up. This is in context of Linux, but can easily be mapped with Windows.
- Ritesh Singh August 12, 2013