Design of A Dynamic Boot Loader for Loading an Operating System

Abstract

Individuals have become increasingly reliant on gadgets like smartphones, laptop or Tablets for business needs as well as their personal use while travelling. In consideration of size, weight, cost and security sometimes carrying a laptop is always not an optimal solution. With technology advancements there are various storage devices available for exploration as portable system and one such device is the Universal Serial Bus (USB). A Live Universal Serial Bus (USB) which is a distribution of the operating system (OS) on a portable device is always connected to or plugged into the USB port of a computer. To boot from the external device, the existing Boot Loader (BL) requires user knowledge in booting the portable system through BIOS. The chief goal of this particular thesis is to intend a Dynamic Boot Loader (DBL) for eliminating the BIOS dependency and proffering a secure USB portable system without changing CMOS settings. Since the portable system is plugged in to unknown device, the data existent in the portable USB flash drives is biometric protected to restrict the access by unauthorized users. Accordingly, this thesis made two significant contributions newline The initial contribution is to explore the boot loading process, analyze the different ways for boot loading the system and discuss the need to dynamically boot load the OS from external storage for effectively optimizing the booting time (BT) of the OS. The Boot Loader (BL) is regarded as the crucial program that loads the OS in memory and initializes the system. Whatever it is, PC, embedded system or smart phone, its concept is the same i.e., loading of OS. The boot process may either run from local hard disk or from external memory storage like optical disk, USB memory, or network interface card with user interaction. The proposed DBL is designed to automatically recognize the Live USB to eliminate the dependency on BIOS and lower the boot time of OS. newline Today, people are constantly on move and they prefer portable systems, especially USB devices due to it