boot strapping

observing onself, or peeling the onion from inside, is an old technique of restarting. just like a computer reboots.

there's a small bit of code that remains essentially unchanged in a chip that reads more code that can change from the hard disk drive. both have to remain synchronized to insure that they can talk to each other.

i was confronted by this essential truth when a hardware technician had me reset the bios to it's default factory setting. seems that the machine thought it was running a serial ata drive and would run a test on it fine. in fact it was a parallel ata drive and windows xp knew that and would not run on it.

seems that just because your hardware runs your software won't necessarily cooperate.