Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

J Gordon Letwin

Mark Joseph Zbikowski

Bryan M Willman

Alan R Whitney

Rajen J Shah

A method in a computer system for loading an operating system into memory through use of a file system that is stored on secondary storage. The operating system is stored on secondary storage as files with file names. Before the operating system is loaded into memory, a bootstrap program loads the file system from secondary storage into memory. The file system is stored at locations in secondary storage that are known to the bootstrap program. The file system also has a mapping of file names of operating system files to locations in secondary storage that contain the operating system files. After loading the file system, the bootstrap program requests the loaded file system to load the operating system files by specifying the file names of the operating system files to be loaded. In response to the request, the file system uses the mapping to retrieve the locations in secondary storage of the operating system files specified by the file names. The loaded file system then loads the operating system files into memory from the retrieved locations of secondary storage. Control can then be transferred to the operating system files.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

J Gordon Letwin