MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing ...

Hardware Detection
NTDETECT.COM and NTOSKRNL.EXE perform hardware detection. NTDETECT.COM
executes after you select Windows XP Professional on the Please Select The Operating
System To Start screen (or after the timer times out).
Note If you select an operating system other than Windows XP Professional (such as Windows
98), NTLDR loads and executes BOOTSECT.DOS, which is a copy of the boot sector that
was on the system partition at the time Windows XP Professional was installed. Passing execution
to BOOTSECT.DOS starts the boot process for the selected operating system.
NTDETECT.COM collects a list of currently installed hardware components and
returns this list to NTLDR for later inclusion in the Registry under the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE key.
NTDETECT.COM detects the following components:
■ Bus/adapter type
■ Communication ports
■ Floating-point coprocessor
■ Floppy disks
■ Keyboard
■ Mouse/pointing device
■ Parallel ports
■ SCSI adapters
■ Video adapters
Configuration Selection
Lesson 1 Explaining the Startup Process
After NTLDR starts loading Windows XP Professional and collects hardware information,
the operating system loader presents you with the Hardware Profile/Configuration
Recovery menu, which contains a list of the hardware profiles that are set up on
the computer. The first hardware profile is highlighted. You can press the DOWN
arrow key to select another profile. You also can press L to invoke the Last Known
Good configuration.
If there is only a single hardware profile, NTLDR does not display the Hardware Profile/Configuration
Recovery menu and loads Windows XP Professional using the
default hardware profile configuration.
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