<Li> The boot partition is a primary partition that contains the boot loader, a piece of software responsible for booting the operating system . For example, in the standard Linux directory layout (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard), boot files (such as the kernel, initrd, and boot loader GRUB) are mounted at / boot / . Despite Microsoft's radically different definition (see below), System Information, a utility app included in Windows NT family of operating systems, refers to it as "boot device". </Li> <Li> The system partition is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root . By default, in Linux, operating system files are mounted at / (the root directory). </Li> <P> In Linux, a single partition can be both a boot and a system partition if both / boot / and the root directory are in the same partition . </P> <P> Since Windows NT 3.1 (the first version of Windows NT), Microsoft has defined the terms as follows: </P>

A disk that has a boot partition is called a