What are the Different Types of Booting?

The two main types of booting are:

1]. A "cold boot" or a "hard reset," which occurrs when the computer (or micro processor system) is powered-up. The system has no history from the previous time it run, and needs to perform comprehensive initialization.

2]. A "warm boot" or "soft reset," which occurrs when resetting the computer or micro processor system without interrupting its power supply. The continued supply of power allows certain initialization tasks to be skipped in the reboot, compared to the cold boot, and the re-initialization might complete sooner.

As part of every boot process, the computer will typically load and initialize an operating system. Subject to the type of computer and operating system, this system might be sourced from mass-storage media such as hard drives, floppy diskettes or DVDs, from networked media such as a network server, or from build-in memory devices such as read-only memory (ROM). Some operating systems may take advantage of reduced initialization during a warm boot, but this is not typically the case with modern mainstream general-purpose computing operating systems.