The PC booting process

A certain mjvines had this explanation as a comment in his bootsector tutorial example. Thanks to him.. Just pasting it here lest I forget at a later point in time.

; Here's a quick summary of what the BIOS does when booting up.
;
; 1) Loads Sector 1, Track 0, Head 0 of the boot drive( A or C ) to
;    absolute address 07C00h-07DFFh
;
; 2) Checks the 16 bit word at absolute address 07DFEh for AA55h.  This is
;    the boot signature and is used by the BIOS to ensure that the sector
;    contains a value bootsector.
;
;    If this signature isn't present, the BIOS will display a message like
;    "Operating System Not Found"
;
; 4) Loads DL with
;         00h if the boot sector was loaded from drive A,
;         80h if the boot sector was loaded from drive C
;
;    This way, the bootsector can determine which drive it was booted from.
;
; 5) Jumps to 0000:7C00h, which is the start of the bootsector

Link: http://gaztek.sourceforge.net/osdev/boot/index.html

And on top of that, remember reading somewhere.. A CD boot is done by actually having a floppy image at the beginning of the cd.. This floppy image is loaded as a ramdisk and the ramdisk is used for the booting.. Can't remember the reference nor the exact details off the top of my head right now :(

Update: Found one reference now http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/cd-roms.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Torito_(CD-ROM_standard)

While still on bootloaders, a good tutorial on using grub by Christopher Giese.
http://my.execpc.com/%7Egeezer/osd/boot/grub-how.txt

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