Reboot v/s Restart

[nainil]

Hi,

Can you please explain me what Reboot is and what Restart is.
Also, there is something like cold reboot and warm reboot. I need to know what they are.

Thank you.
Nainil Chheda.
Payment Gateway India

 

[n_derr]

reboot and restart can mean the same thing, depending on who you ask. In my opinion it's a hard (or cold) restart and a warm reboot.

a hard or cold restart is when you physically turn off your PC (either turn it off and on again or press the restart button). It totally restarts everything.

A warm reboot is when the computer restarts itself. you do this when you select restart in windows or when you press Ctrl-Alt-Del in DOS. When you warm boot, the computer doesn't POST, it just boots up the OS again after showing the BIOS info and whatnot

 

[nainil]

But why have something different...like a reboot or a restart... why 2 different concepts...

Nainil Chheda.

 

[n_derr]

it's really just two words for describing the same function. most people will say whether it is a warm or cold "reboot" or "restart" and not make a difference between reboot and restart

 

[Fragino]

To me Reboot means restarting the computer all the way from the bios, which pretty much means having to do a hardware reboot (turning the computer of and on). This starts the computer all the way from the bios. Restart as it is used in Win XP, means it just restarts the Windows OS itself. It doesn't go through the entire process like n-derr says. In pre-XP days restart meant the whole process from bios onward. The only way to just reload the OS itself was to press some button (I forgot what) after you hit restart.

 

[nainil]

Thanks for answering.

Thank you.
Nainil Chheda.
Payment Gateway India

 

[mikesgroovin]

I feel the same. "Restart" is more of an operating system term. You are restarting the operating system itself with out actually turning the actuall computer off. When you Reboot, you are allowing the computer to totally shut down and then waiting the, ever-so popular "10 seconds" and then starting it up again, allowing the hardware to be once again recognized and yatta yatta....all the way to the OS.

Hope that helps...

-Mike

 

[HoLoCroN]

Technically, reboot and restart are synonyms.

Rebooting is the same as restarting a computer. In Windows when you do a "Start>Shutdown>Restart" or in DOS (you can reboot by pressing the Control, Alt and Delete keys simultaneously) This is called a warm boot, whenever the OS is the one that shuts down the PC.

You can also perform a cold boot by turning the computer off and then on again. (Either by powering it off with the power switch or unplugging the power cable) It is considered "cold" because you pulled the power before giving the OS time to initialize its proper shut down precedures... which in a Windows Registry environment can cause allot of trouble.

 

[wansingct]

They are the same thing functionally, it's how it's done that makes the difference.

A reboot is actually powering down the computer, waiting 5-10 secs and then powering back on, thereby clearing everything out of the ram and starting all your processes back up. This is also known as a hard restart or a "not graceful" shutdown.

A restart on the other hand is initiated by windows, and conducts a graceful (or soft) shutdown where windows wirtes all information stored in the ram to the hard drive, sends stop commands to all of its processes and once everything is finished it cuts its own power and reboots right away.

The main difference is that with a soft shutdown, your information integrity is almost guaranteed. With a hard restart, your computer may have been in the middle of thinking about something and you could have possibly caused corruption of your drive etc. In a home system, this isn't too much of an issue, but on something like an exchange server if you do a hard restart you just corrupted your exchange databases (or any database running on that server really).

I've seen older winNT boxes take almost an hour to commit all the transaction logs into the information store and stop the exchange services before you could even think about touching the power button without information loss.......but that's another story I guess......

 

[rookie1010]

i thought reboot meant booting up the OS and drivers from the hard drive(or cdrom) and restart would be restarting the whole thing(physically turning off the power,followed by another boot)