US Patent 7895424 System for automated boot from disk image

A system allowing a target machine to be booted up from a disk image stored in memory. Instead of reading the boot-up information from a disk drive or other physical device the data is read from memory. No modification is necessary to native operating system, input/output subsystem, bootstrap code, etc., since the invention modifies characteristics, such as vectors used by the operating system, to make the disk image in memory appear to be the same as a standard external device.