Design of a Dynamic Boot Loader for Loading an Operating System

Abstract

Boot Loader is the crucial program that loads the operating system in memory and initializes the system. In today’s world people are constantly on move and portable system are in demand specially the USB devices due to its portability and accessibility compared to CD/DVD drives. The purpose of this paper is to design a dynamic boot loader which removes the BIOS dependency and allow user to boot from USB without changing CMOS settings. The USB is devised as plug and play portable system with puppy Linux and newly developed dynamic boot loader. The device is experimented on a computer machine with 8 GB RAM, i5 processor, 64-bit Operating system and windows 7 and observed that nearly 50% reduction in booting time i.e., the time spent in changing the boot order is eliminated compared to the static boot loader. The time spent in the BIOS is dependent on the user knowledge in changing the boot priority. The portable system allows the user to work in ease in any environment with minimum requirement of Windows XP and USB 2.0 compatible system.