The Beginning of Life

Now that the summer vacations have started, and I’ve got more time on my hands…I’ve decided to start this series of small articles, which are of help to people who aren’t that great with computers.

Now, when you switch on your PC, first of all, the BIOS, also known as Basic Input/Output Services, fires up. This is the very core of your PC. It checks if all components are working fine. Your CD drive makes some noise, your fans run at max speed, your RAM is checked and your drives are detected.

Next, it goes on to hand over control to the operating system. It checks devices like the hard drive, CD-ROM, floppies and USB drives in a particular order, called the boot order. Normally, the CD-ROM is given a higher priority than the hard disk. This is so, because if you have a CD from which you can boot, like your Windows installation CD, or a Linux Live CD, in your drive, you don’t need to do anything…the PC handles it all. A bootable CD is a CD from which you can directly load an OS. The Windows installer works this way, as does Linux.

Although Windows uses it just for installing Windows and for loading an emergency recovery console, Linux distributions often load a version of the OS onto the CD for directly trying it out. They do so, because many people are apprehensive about installing Linux directly, and will be more willing to install it if they can try it out first, without harming their original OS. This kind of CD is called a Live CD.

If you changed your boot order is different, you’ll need to enter the BIOS menu and change the boot order for good, or you can temporarily select a device to boot from, by selecting the device from the boot menu. Both of these can be accessed by pressing certain keyswhen the BIOS POST (Power-On Self Test). The keys are mentioned while the POST is taking place.

Some people, like me, like to change their boot order, because it makes booting just a second or two faster. Instead of checking the CD-ROM for usually non-existent boot disks, I make my BIOS just go for the hard drive. If I ever put in a bootable CD, I press F8 to bring up the boot menu, and select the CD drive.