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The File System Paradox
If you take a look around your hard drive, you probably have noticed that a good number of operating system files hang out in the root directory of the boot drive. If you take a closer look at those files, you may notice a theme: boot.ini, NTLDR, and NTDETECT.COM are critical boot files, and hiberfil.sys is the hibernation file. These are all files that are involved in the crucial first stages of booting the operating system or, in the case of hiberfil.sys, resuming from hibernation, and they have to go into the root of the boot drive. Why can't you move them somewhere else?My colleague Adrian Oney explained: in order to read the boot files off the disk, you need the file system driver, but the file system driver is on the disk, which you can't read until you've loaded the file system driver. Oh no, Catch-22!
The vicious cycle is broken by having a miniature file system driver built into the critical boot files. This miniature driver knows just barely enough to locate files in the root directory and load them into memory. Those files can, in turn, get the operating system off the ground, at which point the real file system driver can take over and look for files in much fancier places like subdirectories.(continue at source)