I was reading about NTFS and the use of the driver ntfs.sys and I was wondering how could the NTFS driver be loaded if it's on an NTFS partition.
I couldn't find any answer for this online and I was curious to know how it works.
Asked
Active
Viewed 3,548 times
1 Answers
47
ntfs.sys is the NTFS driver for the Windows operating system. However, Windows does not start itself. It relies on the Windows Boot Manager. Windows Boot Manager and winload have built-in NTFS support. It is likely not as full-featured as ntfs.sys.
Windows Boot Manager (or rather winload) is responsible for loading all early drivers. These also include disk controller drivers (AHCI, NVMe, …)—otherwise, Windows could not continue booting.
This situation is somewhat comparable with Linux: GRUB, a popular Linux boot manager, includes support for many filesystems, including the ext family (ext2/3/4).
user219095
- 65,551