72 Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010
Block
See Sector (p. 80).
Boot sector
The first sector (p. 80) of a disk (p. 73) or a volume (p. 82) that contains the initial code to start the
operating system.
The boot sector must end with a hexadecimal signature of 0xAA55.
Boot volume
The volume which contains files that are necessary for a particular Windows operating system to
start and work.
If only one Windows operating system is installed on your machine, the boot volume is usually the
same as the system volume (p. 81).
If more than one Windows operating system is installed on your machine, each of these operating
systems normally has its own boot volume, whereas there is still only one system volume.
In terms of volume type, a boot volume can be a primary or logical volume on a basic disk, or a
simple volume on a dynamic disk.
See also system volume (p. 81).
Bootable media
A physical media (CD, DVD, USB flash drive or other media supported by a machine BIOS as a boot
device) that contains a bootable version of Acronis Disk Director or Windows Preinstallation
Environment (WinPE) with the Acronis Plug-in for WinPE.
A machine can also be booted into the above environments using the network boot from Acronis PXE
Server or Microsoft Remote Installation Service (RIS). These servers with uploaded bootable
components can also be thought of as a kind of bootable media.
Bootable media is most often used to create basic or dynamic volumes on bare metal.
Booting
The process of starting a machine when the machine is turned on or reset.
When the machine boots, its hardware runs a program known as a boot loader, which in turn starts
the selected operating system.
A machine that cannot boot normally—for example, because a volume with the operating system is
not available—is called unbootable.
Some operations, such as resizing the system volume in Windows, require rebooting the machine.
C
Cluster
The unit of disk space allocation to store files in a file system.
