Establishing a virtual drive accessible to pre-boot and operating system runtime phases

摘要

A method, system and article of manufacture to establish a virtual drive accessible to pre-boot and operating system runtime phases. A virtual drive is constructed from a physical storage device of a computer system during a pre-boot phase of the computer system. A virtual drive controller is initialized during the pre-boot phase to support the virtual drive. Information on the virtual drive is accessed using the virtual drive controller by firmware during the pre-boot phase. The information on the virtual drive is accessed using the virtual drive controller by an operating system (OS) of the computer system during an OS runtime phase, wherein the information is comprehensible by the firmware and the OS.