It is composed of three distinct components:
stores, objects, and elements, as described in Table 1-2. The component hierarchy is
shown in Figure 1-9.
BCD Store
The BCD store is the physical binary file that is stored either on the active partition or on
the EFI system partition (ESP). It stores all the information that describes the bootup environment
for each Windows instance on the system or other boot loaders such as NTLDR.
11 Chapter 1: Getting Started with Windows Server 2008
Each system can have more than one BCD store; however, only one store can be the active
system store. A simple example of an additional BCD store would be a backup of the active
system store. For BIOS-based systems, this file is stored under the active partition??™s
\BOOT folder, whereas for EFI-based systems, it is stored under \Windows\Boot\EFI.
Table 1-2. BCD Components
Component Description
BCD Store Top-level component in the hierarchy. Think of this as the root
of all components in the hierarchy; it serves as the starting
namespace for the items it contains. You can also think of the
store as the actual physical BCD file.
BCD Object In the abstract, this serves as a container for all BCD elements.
In practical terms, information pertaining to the boot
environment for each instance of the Windows boot loader is
typically stored here. For example, in a multi-boot scenario,
each Windows Server 2008 instance installed on the system
would be represented by a distinct BCD object.
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