A+ Certification Course Help

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Hello All,
I am currently subscribed and am well underway the A+ 900 series videos. I am about 50% through the course. The hosts are great and the visual aids are excellent for learning. I am a bit concerned however because I feel like certain concepts are not discussed. For Example, I recently watched the "installing an OS" three part series and am still a little unsure about dealing with multiple operating systems on the same drive and concepts such as the master boot record. AM I getting ahead of myself? Is this information further along in the series and i just need to be patient? Thank you

Hey Wyatt,

That is a great question or questions, let's see if I can help out with these topics.

Dual Boot Systems and the Master Boot Record
Understand that only one operating system can control a system unit (PC) at a time (until virtualization). The normal boot process is as follows:

POST >>> BIOS and CMOS>>>MBR or in other words the Power-on Self Test locates and verifies the presence of CPU, RAM, Video, Audio, BIOS, and then BIOS brings the hardware subsystem online and stabilizes it. After this the BIOS looks for a master boot record (MBR) which points to the boot code and the operating system(OS) to bootstrap so that it can take over the hardware.

In a single boot system there is a single operating system to run the whole show and the MBR contains a single entry pointing to the partition or location of that OS as it resides on the hard drive.

In a dual boot or multi-boot system the master boot record contains two entries pointing to two partitions or locations on the hard drive and the PC will typically present the user with a multi-operating system selection screen (for example Windows 7 and Windows 10) that the user will make a selection of which OS to bootstrap. When the user makes a choice of which OS to boot to the master boot record is checked for the entry that points to that selected operating system boot code and this OS takes over the hardware (or loads).

Keep in mind to boot to the other OS in a dual boot situation, the user must first shutdown the currently running OS, restart the machine and let it go through POST>>>BIOS/CMOS>>>MBR and select the other OS at the multi-operating system selection screen and the other OS will bootstrap (or load) the system.

Hope this helps Wyatt!

@wes-bryan Thank you very much Wes! One more follow-up question: What episode to your recollection can I find this information in? Is it included in the "installing an OS" series with Ronnie and Dan? or am i jumping the gun a bit and it isnt covered untill later episodes? Thank you very much for your help.

I am not sure as we have over 50 hours, of A+ content, however if you can commit to memory the relevant information in this thread you will have the information you need. If you do have additional questions on MBR or dual Boot please do not hesitate to ask them, we will be more than glad to address these.