Systems and methods are disclosed for providing accelerated loading of operating system and application programs. In one aspect, a method for providing accelerated loading of an operating system comprises the steps of: maintaining a list of boot data; preloading the boot data upon initialization of the computer system; and servicing requests for boot data from the computer system using the preloaded boot data. In a preferred embodiment, the boot data is retrieved from a boot device and stored in a cache memory device. In another aspect, a method for accelerated loading of an operating system comprises updating the list of boot data during the boot process, wherein updating comprises adding to the list any boot data requested by the computer system not previously stored in the list and/or removing from the list any boot data previously stored in the list and not requested by the computer system.