BIOS / UEFI / Secure Boot / Grub / MBR Explanations?

[CatherineJThomas]

Could somebody point me in the direction of an explanation of these terms and how they are related to each other? Obviously I can do a search and find explanations of each term in isolation, but I'm having trouble understanding the relationship between them.

Or maybe a better way to ask the same thing would be to ask where I can find an up-to-date explanation of the boot sequence. Or maybe evan a flow chart? Like "when the computer is first powered on, it executes commands in the firmware that do this and this, and then pass control to xxxx. And so on.)


Sorry if this question is vague. I'm not even sure I know what it is that I don't know.

 

[i7Baby]

Bios - is the firmware for the motherboard. It can control RAM, the CPU and how your pc runs.

UEFI - is software that you can use to get into some of the bios functions eg monitoring temps, controlling fan speeds, overclocking the cpu

MBR - Master Boot Record - part of your hard drive storage that remembers how you want your pc set up - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

GRUB - is software to let you start up a pc with different configurations - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB

Secure Boot - is a standard to make sure only tested and approved software is used to start up your pc - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824987.aspx