State governing the performance of optional booting operations

Abstract

The present invention is directed to a facility for performing selected operations as part of a booting process of a computer system only during iterations of the booting process that immediately follow failed iterations of the booting process. At the beginning of the booting process, the facility copies a persistent instance of a flag indicating whether the iteration of the booting process at the current iteration of the booting process immediately follows fail to a temporary instance of the flag. The facility then assigns the persistent instance of the flag to the set condition so that, if the current iteration of the booting process fails before completing, the flag will reflect that the current iteration of the booting process failed. When each selected operation is encountered during the current iteration of the booting process, the facility performs that selected operation only if the temporary instance of the flag is set. If and when the current iteration of the booting process concludes successfully, the facility clears the persistent instance of the flag to reflect that the current iteration of the booting process completed successfully. In a further preferred embodiment, programs, such as the BIOS or the operating system, may set a second flag to explicitly request the performance of the selected operations during the next iteration of the booting process.