Q. How could a system be designed to allow a choice of operating systems to boot from? What would the bootstrap program need to do?
Answer: Delieve a system that would like to run both Windows XP and three different distributions of Linux (example Debian, RedHat and Mandrake). Every operating system will be stored on disk. During system boot-up a unique program (which we will call the boot manager) will determine which operating system to boot into. This income that relatively initially booting to an operating system the boot manager will first run during system start-up. It is this boot manager that is accountable for determining which system to boot into. Classically boot managers must be stored at certain locations of the hard disk to be recognized during system start-up. Boot managers frequently provide the user with a selection of systems to boot into boot managers are as well typically designed to boot into a default operating system if no choice is selected by the user.