In today’s ‘Acronym Soup’ blog post, we ask another BIOS-related question: “What is ESP?”
The acronym ESP stands for EFI System Partition and describes the creation of several regions in a disk drive so that information from each region can be managed separately by the operating system installed in a computer.
The ESP contains four main components, which include:
- boot loader programs for the operating system
- drivers for all the hardware devices present and used by the computer during boot
- system utility programs that start prior to booting an operating system
- data files such as error logs.
ESP partitions were developed to ensure that the UEFI firmware will load the operating system and all the other utilities present in the system as soon as the computer is booted. The boot loader ensures that all necessary files have already been loaded before the booting sequence is complete.
This partitioning system also ensures that any errors encountered by a user, which are relevant to a computer’s startup phase are resolved. For this reason, the boot loader is an integral part of the operating system that ensures a consistent, high-quality start up experience for the user.
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