Käynnistettävät

Käynnistettävät is a Finnish term that translates to "bootable" in English. It refers to a digital medium, such as a CD, DVD, USB drive, or even a network location, that contains an operating system or other software that can be loaded and executed when a computer is turned on. This process is known as booting.

A bootable medium is essential for tasks like installing a new operating system, performing system recovery, or running diagnostic tools. It allows the computer to start from a different source than its primary hard drive, providing a clean environment to load necessary programs. For an operating system to be bootable, it must contain a boot loader, which is a small program that resides in a specific location on the storage medium. This boot loader is responsible for initiating the operating system's loading sequence.

Creating a bootable USB drive, for instance, typically involves formatting the drive and then copying the necessary operating system files and the boot loader onto it. This process is often facilitated by specialized software. Similarly, bootable CDs and DVDs are created by burning an ISO image file, which contains the bootable structure and files, onto the optical disc. The computer's BIOS or UEFI firmware is configured to check these bootable devices in a specific order during startup to determine where to load the operating system from.