Boot image

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A boot image is a type of disk image that when on a boot device allows the associated computer to boot.^[1]

A boot image usually includes an operating system, utilities, diagnostics, boot and data recovery information and applications used organization-wide. A specialized image for a particular department or type of user may be called a departmental boot image. Building such an image can take days or weeks, and involve complex decisions about licensing and permissions - including which passwords to store in the boot image and which to require users to type in - and requires experts in software integration to do.

However, once built, the boot image can be simply copied onto devices, patched within reasonable limits, and remains disposable in case of any problems (viruses in particular). This is possible because unlike other hard drive images (which may contain any data, et al.), pure boot images contain no mission-critical data. By definition a pure boot image contains no data that cannot be reproduced from configurations or off-the-shelf executables. In particular end-user data is not part of a boot image, although some operating systems require that a copy of user preferences or configuration files be kept within the boot image itself, e.g. Microsoft Windows registry. Utilities like Norton Ghost keep a backup copy of the boot image, for quick re-imaging (often called re-installation) in the event of a problem, thus avoiding the need to diagnose a specific problem with a specific machine.