Method and apparatus for booting a portable computing device

Details Method and apparatus for booting a portable computing device Method and apparatus for booting a portable computing device

1997-12-18

2000-04-25

Palys, Joseph E.

Electrical computers and digital processing systems: support

Digital data processing system initialization or configuration

Loading initialization program

G06F 906

Patent

active

060556315

ABSTRACT:
A method of booting a portable computing device or a personal digital assistant (PDA) is described. In one embodiment, the PDA comprises a boot ROM, a RAM, and a connector for connecting to an external floppy disk drive (FDD). Operating system software and application software for the PDA is stored on a disk in FDD. To boot the PDA, the PDA is connected to the external FDD, then powered up. The PDA is hardwired to begin executing code from the boot ROM, which contains a program to transfer code from the FDD to the RAM, then jump to an entry point in the newly loaded code in the RAM. The PDA is then disconnected from the FDD. To configure the PDA with different operating system and/or different application software, the FDD is loaded with a disk storing this different software and the boot process is repeated. Thus, the PDA can be configured to support any number of different operating systems and any number of different applications despite having a limited capacity of RAM.

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