Open Source Windows Boot Software

rEFInd is a fork of the rEFIt boot manager. Like rEFIt, rEFInd can auto-detect your installed EFI boot loaders and it presents a pretty GUI menu of boot options. rEFInd goes beyond rEFIt in that rEFInd better handles systems with many boot loaders, gives better control over the boot loader search process, and provides the ability for users to define their own boot loader entries.

Rufus is a standalone app designed to format and create a bootable USB drive for a large variety of ISOs. The app is just over 1MB in size and is notably faster than similar competitor apps such as the Windows 7 USB utility, Universal USB Installer, and UNetbootin. Rufus can come in handy when you need to simply format a USB drive, install an OS on a machine that lacks a CD/DVD-ROM drive, or when you need to boot an operating system temporarily without intentions of actually installing the media. This can be immensely useful while you're on the go or just need access to an OS for a temporary, isolated reason. The app can even be used to flash firmware to BIOS or other destinations by just using DOS. Even though Rufus is a tiny utility in comparison to other USB creation tools that can be rather bulky in size, it contends easily with the competition and creates bootable USB drives in record time!

Super GRUB2 Disk helps you to boot into most any Operating System (OS) even if you cannot boot into it by normal means.

Project has moved to https://github.com/CloverHackyColor/CloverBootloader.

GRUB for DOS is the dos extension of GRUB. It enables dos users to run the configuration console directly in real mode. The project also contains an utility called WINGRUB, an GUI intends to help configuring and installing GRUB in the WINDOWS environment

AIO Boot is a tool that can help you create a bootable USB with Grub2, Grub4dos, Syslinux, Clover and rEFInd. AIO Boot can boot Windows and most Linux distributions and boot via LAN using Tiny PXE Server. AIO Boot is constructed from a variety of sources, certainly still a lot of flaws, eager for sympathy. I would love to hear from you so that I can improve this tool better.

Awdbedit is a BIOS editor for Award BIOSes. It supports unpacking, replacing, and repacking of components within a BIOS image, and allows settings to be changed and tweaks to be applied to the actual BIOS itself.

Universal BootLoader Tool helps you easily recover from a failed rom flash, and is known to turn an free update rom into a full rom. (e.g. from the free WM5 update rom available for hx4700 Pocket PCs on HP.com) Only tested with HP iPAQ Pocket PCs.

GAG is a graphical boot manager, designed to be easy-to-use and intuitive, but without loosing advanced features, like passwords or swapping drives.

OpenBLT is mostly used as an STM32 bootloader, due to the popularity of STM32 microcontrollers. However, the bootloader’s architecture is such that it can work with any microcontroller and use any type of communication interface to perform firmware updates.

PeToUSB is a Win32 GUI application for formatting and making bootable, USB Flash Memory Drives and USB HardDisks and optionally copying the output from a successful BartPE/WinPE build to the device. There are options to backup/restore the MBR on a device

Daxtar's Shutdown Timer is a minimalistic tool to schedule your System's Shutdown via GUI or comand-line. The Tool docks at the Windows System Tray to give you easy and quick GUI access. written by Martin Bachem

An program to easily go into the UEFI/BIOS in Windows by rebooting the system into UEFI/BIOS mode. WinUEFI helps you to easily get into your firmware settings (UEFI/BIOS). Here can settings such as time, boot device and other options be changed. This reboots your device directly into it with one click.

Ranish Boot and Partitioning Tools

A win32 GUI shell for the UPX executable packer.

XOSL is a graphical boot manager that supports multi-booting of various operating systems. Development is currently done under the XOSL2 title. Historical version download below:

Operating system project from scratch to design and implement all components from boot strapping,hardware interrupts , memory manger ,file system , etc .

ThinTUX is a small Linux distribution for thin clients. It has support for all major remote access protocols. The distribution can be booted from the network. The configuration is stored on a DHCP server to simplify terminal management.

Multi Boot Manager allow chang the boot, this version need be insert into MASTER BOOT RECORD (MBR, track 0, side 0, sector 0), and the original content need be insert into last sector (Sector B3F or Physical address Track 4f, Side 1, Sector 12h). Made in

AiR-Boot is a x86 boot-loader that resides completely in track 0 of the harddrive. It‘s also independent of any OS, features a BIOS-like built-in setup, is localized to German, Dutch, French, Italian, Russian (including Cyrillic) and Swedish.

A web based GUI for managing PXE boot and optionally managing DHCP service. Also supports creating and serving Kickstart and preseed scripts. This provides a client install in one click. This is a generic framework created to work with anything that's PXE bootable. Adding new hosts can be done via "PXE enrollment" where the client PXE boots to enroll into OneClickKick. Easily integrated with existing naming sources such as NIS and LDAP for central lookup of host and mac address information. OneClickKIck can also be integrated with FreeIPA (www.freeipa.org) to allow adding and modifying hosts directly in IPA.

Tool for creating live usb-drives and downloading distros. This is an upgraded version of Unetbootin focusing on Bittix linux 9 and above and Linux Mint and Linux Mint debian. Has Distrowatch.com link etc.

Cloudium OS is being written in pure ASM. It's designed for speed and ease, having cloud computing in mind. It also is secure (without requiring constant user input like Windows). But, how are we going to do this? Well every os wants/says these kind of things, so to accomplish our goals we follow these simple rules: keep it simple (that's way better then these complex interfaces etc. almost nobody wants), generalize (this makes things easier and more useful without extra complexity) and be inventive (sometimes doing it the classical way just doesn't work). Note: development peace will be temporarily lowered until February the fifth. Please check out our OS and Project site!

ARMboot is an Open-Source firmware suite for ARM based platforms. ARMboot is heavily based on the sister-project PPCboot, which provides similar functionality on PowerPC based systems. ARMboot shall be a common, easy-to-use and easy-to-port boot platform

Committed to the development of fundamental ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) components for Linux. This includes a generic ACPI table parser, AML interpreter, bus and device drivers, policy, user interface, and support tools.