We know that a Windows virtual machine without a virtio driver installed must use an IDE to start normally. Only after the virtio driver is installed can it be started with the virtio system disk.
As far as I Know, during installing the virtio driver in Windows, virtio.sys is stored in the C:/ drive and some registry items are modified (and the registry hive file is also on the C:/ drive).
My question is that, during the startup phase, how does the Windows startup boot program (perhaps winloader.exe) load virtio.sys? Because there is a chicken-and-egg problem here, winloader.exe needs virtio.sys to recognize the disk device, but virtio.sys is stored on the disk device. So, how does Windows do it?
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