There seems to be some confusion between BIOS and The initial bootstrap. A lot of what happens as the computer runs up is loosely considered bootstrapping (IMO this is more properly known as booting) . However, IMO, What the bios does after the initial bootstrap has been loaded is more in the sense of loading and running programs. The following excerpt from the given link seems to support this idea ;-http://www.vnutz.com...ootstrap_loader In my day, with even a mainframe machine, the initial boot was sometimes just a single hard wired instruction which pointed you to a location and what was found was accepted as the first programmed instruction. What happened subsequently was up to software developers. What they arranged they would call booting this and booting that, not bootstrapping. I have to admit I may be 40 odd years out of date with how these matters are considered today. I was a hardware engineer - we often saw things differently to the software people!