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System Deployment Image
A System Deployment Image (SDI) is a file format used primarily with Microsoft products to contain an arbitrary disk image, including boot sector information. Description The System Deployment Image (SDI) file format is often used to allow the use of a virtual disk for startup or booting. Some versions of Microsoft Windows allow for "RAM booting", which is essentially the ability to load an SDI file into memory and then boot from it. The SDI file format also lends itself to network booting using the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE). Another usage is hard disk imaging. The SDI file itself is partitioned into the following sections: ; Boot BLOB : This contains the actual boot program, STARTROM.COM. This is analogous to the boot sector of a hard disk. ; Load BLOB : This typically contains NTLDR and is launched by the boot BLOB. ; Part BLOB : This contains the actual boot runtime (i.e. the contents of the disk image including any Operating System Sfiles) and also includes the b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The early 1980s and home computers, rise of personal computers through software like Windows, and the company has since expanded to Internet services, cloud computing, video gaming and other fields. Microsoft is the List of the largest software companies, largest software maker, one of the Trillion-dollar company, most valuable public U.S. companies, and one of the List of most valuable brands, most valuable brands globally. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows. During the 41 years from 1980 to 2021 Microsoft released 9 versions of MS-DOS with a median frequen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boot
A boot is a type of footwear. Most boots mainly cover the foot and the ankle, while some also cover some part of the lower calf. Some boots extend up the leg, sometimes as far as the knee or even the hip. Most boots have a heel that is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the sole, even if the two are made of one piece. Traditionally made of leather or rubber, modern boots are made from a variety of materials. Boots are worn both for their functionality and for reasons of style and fashion. Functional concerns include: protection of the foot and leg from water, mud, pestilence (infectious disease, insect bites and stings, snake bites), extreme temperatures, sharp or blunt hazards (e.g. work boots may provide steel toes), physical abrasion, corrosive agents, or damaging radiation; ankle support and traction for strenuous activities such as hiking; and durability in harsh conditions (e.g. the underside of combat boots may be reinforced with hobnails). In some cases, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windows Imaging Format
The Windows Imaging Format (WIM) is a file-based disk image format. It was developed by Microsoft to help deploy Windows Vista and subsequent versions of the Windows operating system family. Design Like other disk image formats, a WIM file contains a set of files and associated filesystem metadata. However, unlike sector-based formats (such as ISO or VHD), WIM is file-based: the fundamental unit of information in a WIM is a file. The primary advantages of being file-based is hardware independence and single-instance storage of a file referenced multiple times in the filesystem tree. Since the files are stored inside a single WIM file, the overhead of opening and closing many individual files is reduced. The cost of reading or writing many thousands of individual files on the local disk is negated by hardware and software-based disk caching as well as sequential reading and writing of the data. WIM files can contain multiple disk images, which are referenced either by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NTFS
NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Table, FAT. NTFS adds several features that File Allocation Table, FAT and HPFS (file system), HPFS lack, including: access control lists (ACLs); filesystem encryption; transparent compression; sparse files; Journaling file system, file system journaling and shadow copy, volume shadow copy, a feature that allows backups of a system while in use. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family superseding the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. NTFS read/write support is available on Linux and Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD using NTFS3 in Linux kernel, Linux and NTFS-3G in BSD. NTFS uses several files hidden from the user to store metadata about other files stored on the drive which can help impr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windows Preinstallation Environment
Windows Preinstallation Environment (also known as Windows PE and WinPE) is a lightweight version of Windows used for the deployment of PCs, workstations, and servers, or troubleshooting an operating system while it is offline. It is intended to replace MS-DOS boot disks and can be booted via USB flash drive, PXE, iPXE, CD, DVD, or hard drive. Traditionally used by large corporations and OEMs (to preinstall Windows client operating systems on PCs during manufacturing), it is now widely available free of charge via Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (WADK) (formerly Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)). Overview WinPE was originally intended to be used only as a pre-installation platform for deploying Microsoft Windows operating systems, specifically to replace MS-DOS in this respect. WinPE has the following uses: * Deployment of workstations and servers in large corporations as well as pre-installation by system builders of workstations and servers to be sol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft Windows. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006, and over the following two months, it was released in stages to business customers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and retail channels. On January 30, 2007, it was released internationally and was made available for purchase and download from the Windows Marketplace; it is the first release of Windows to be made available through a digital distribution platform. Development of Windows Vista began in 2001 under the codename "Longhorn"; originally envisioned as a minor successor to Windows XP, it feature creep, gradually included numerous new features from the then-next major release of Windows codenamed "Blackc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Master Boot Record
A master boot record (MBR) is a type of boot sector in the first block of disk partitioning, partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond. The concept of MBRs was publicly introduced in 1983 with PC DOS 2.0. The MBR holds the information on how the disc's sectors (A.K.A. "blocks") are divided into partitions, each partition notionally containing a file system. The MBR also contains executable code to function as a loader for the installed operating system—usually by passing control over to the loader's second stage, or in conjunction with each partition's volume boot record (VBR). This MBR code is usually referred to as a boot loader. The organization of the partition table in the MBR limits the maximum addressable storage space of a partitioned disk to 2 Tebibyte, TiB . Approaches to slightly raise this limit utilizing 32-bit arithmetic or 4096-byte sectors are not officially s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RAM Disk
A RAM drive (also called a RAM disk) is a block of random-access memory ( primary storage or volatile memory) that a computer's software is treating as if the memory were a disk drive (secondary storage). RAM drives provide high-performance temporary storage for demanding tasks and protect non-volatile storage devices from wearing down, since RAM is not prone to wear from writing, unlike non-volatile flash memory. It is sometimes referred to as a virtual RAM drive or software RAM drive to distinguish it from a hardware RAM drive that uses separate hardware containing RAM, which is a type of battery-backed solid-state drive. Historically primary storage based mass storage devices were conceived to bridge the performance gap between internal memory and secondary storage devices. In the advent of solid-state devices this advantage lost most of its appeal. However, solid-state devices do suffer from wear from frequent writing. Primary memory writes do not so or in far lesser eff ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NTLDR
NTLDR (abbreviation of ''NT loader'') is the boot loader for all releases of Windows NT operating system from 1993 with the release of Windows NT 3.1 up until Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. From Windows Vista onwards it was replaced by the BOOTMGR bootloader. NTLDR is typically run from the primary storage device, but it can also run from portable storage devices such as a CD-ROM, USB flash drive, or floppy disk. NTLDR can also load a non NT-based operating system given the appropriate boot sector in a file. NTLDR requires, at the minimum, the following two files to be on the system volume: * , the main boot loader itself * , required for booting an NT-based OS, detects basic hardware information needed for successful boot An additional important file is ''boot.ini'', which contains boot configuration (if missing, NTLDR will default to ''\Windows'' on the first partition of the first hard drive). NTLDR is launched by the volume boot record of system partition, which is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disk Image
A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's content typically stored in a file on another storage device. Traditionally, a disk image was relatively large because it was a bit-by-bit copy of every storage location of a device (i.e. every sector of a hard disk drive), but it is now common to only store allocated data to reduce storage space. Compression and deduplication are commonly used to further reduce the size of image files. Disk imaging is performed for a variety of purposes including digital forensics, cloud computing, system administration, backup, and emulation for digital preservation strategy. Despite the benefits, storage costs can be high, management can be difficult and imaging can be time consuming. Disk images can be made in a variety of formats depending on the purpose. Virtual disk images (such as VHD and VMDK) are intended to be used for cloud computing, ISO images are intended to emulate optical media, such as a CD-ROM. Raw disk images are use ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary Large Object
Object storage (also known as object-based storage or blob storage) is a computer data storage approach that manages data as "blobs" or "objects", as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems, which manage data as a file hierarchy, and block storage, which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Each object is typically associated with a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level (object-storage device), the system level, and the interface level. In each case, object storage seeks to enable capabilities not addressed by other storage architectures, like interfaces that are directly programmable by the application, a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware, and data-management functions like data replication and data distribution at object-level granularity. Object storage systems allow retention of massive amounts of unstructured data ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Disk Image
A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's content typically stored in a file on another storage device. Traditionally, a disk image was relatively large because it was a bit-by-bit copy of every storage location of a device (i.e. every sector of a hard disk drive), but it is now common to only store allocated data to reduce storage space. Compression and deduplication are commonly used to further reduce the size of image files. Disk imaging is performed for a variety of purposes including digital forensics, cloud computing, system administration, backup, and emulation for digital preservation strategy. Despite the benefits, storage costs can be high, management can be difficult and imaging can be time consuming. Disk images can be made in a variety of formats depending on the purpose. Virtual disk images (such as VHD and VMDK) are intended to be used for cloud computing, ISO images are intended to emulate optical media, such as a CD-ROM. Raw disk images are use ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
