Boot image

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Boot image" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A boot image is a type of disk image (a computer file containing the complete contents and structure of a storage medium). When it is transferred onto a boot device it allows the associated hardware to boot.^[1]

The boot image usually includes the operating system, utilities and diagnostics, as well as boot and data recovery information. It also includes those "applications" used organization-wide. A specialized image for a particular type of user or department is called typically 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.