FreeBSD® Unleashed

The Bootstrap

After the POST is complete, the BIOS searches for a device on your system that it can boot from. The devices that are searched and the order they are searched in depend on the configuration you have set up in your BIOS setup program. The normal device to boot from is the first hard disk in the system, but other possible devices include the floppy drive, the CD-ROM drive, and even the network card for systems that have no hard disk and support loading the operating system over the network from a server. The system normally boots from the first bootable device it finds. After a bootable device is found (in this case, we assume that it is the hard disk), the BIOS begins the bootstrap procedure. The bootstrap is a multistage process, ...