Design and Development of a Dynamic Boot Loader for Loading an Operating System: An Update

The purpose of this paper is to design a dynamic boot loader which removes the BIOS dependency and allows user to boot from USB without changing CMOS settings. 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 the move and portable system are in demand specially the USB devices due to its portability and accessibility compared to CD/DVD drives. To boot from USB, the user needs to change the boot order and choose the USB to start the booting process from USB. The available boot process is static which is dependent on user changing the BIOS 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. Since the OS runs from the USB and not dependent on the operating system of the machine, the proposed design achieves security for the data stored as well as make the environment secure. The kernel image can be customized as per the requirement of the user. This will greatly improve the loading time of the OS to the host machine.