Computer Access and Boot Restriction

If the user wants to protect operating system booting only and restrict access to the whole computer system (without the need in encrypting the information on it) Boot protection with Disk Password Protection will be the right solution. It is appropriate for the cases when simple access restriction with a password will be sufficient for preventing unauthorized persons from using your computer and files.

When the computer power is turned on, a booting or, precisely, bootstrapping process starts involving initialization of an operating system by some simpler program (e.g. BIOS). Operating system is normally located on one of the partitions of a hard disk (traditionally mounted to letter C and referred to as the system disk), and is booted from there.
Any hard disk has a separate sector as small as 512 bytes containing the so-called MBR (Master Boot Record), responsible for keeping records of the partitions on the hard drive, booting and connecting the disk to the system. It is located not in some partition, but in the first sector of a disk. Some part of this MBR contains a Partition Table with the information about the partitions of the hard drive, while the booting partition has a system loader in its first sector responsible for booting of a particular operating system. This means that when the user wants to boot the system, the computer loads the MBR of the hard drive for it to continue with the process, the MBR in its turn scans the Partition Table to find the booting disk partition (or the operating system disk partition) and refers to the first sector of that partition to start its booting.

With boot protection enabled, this is where Disk Password Protection places its action: the program replaces the existing MBR of the booting disk or disk partition with its own MBR, the standard MBR written to a reserve space. With the program in action, the new MBR would request the user to provide a password to enable the original MBR to load the operating system. Once the correct password is entered, the standard MBR is loaded and the operating system is booting.