Which program is the boot loader when Windows XP starts up?

• A. KERNEL.EXE
• B. NTLDR
• C. LOADER
• D. LILO

Answer: (B)

Booting Windows XP uses a dedicated boot loader called NTLDR. After the system starts, NTLDR reads the boot configuration (boot.ini) to determine which Windows installation to load, then it loads the core components needed to start the OS, including the kernel (ntoskrnl.exe) and the hardware abstraction layer (hal.dll). Once those are loaded, control is passed to the kernel to continue the startup process.

This is why NTLDR is the correct choice: it is specifically the boot loader used by Windows NT-based systems like XP. The other options aren’t used as the boot loader in Windows XP. KERNEL.EXE isn’t the boot loader for XP, LOADER is a generic term and not the XP boot loader, and LILO is the Linux boot loader rather than a Windows component.