This phase begins with the loading of ntoskrnl.exe, along with the file hall.dll. NTLDR will also read the SYSTEM registry key into memory, and select the hardware configuration and control set (from the Registry) that will be used for this boot.
If you have more than one hardware profile created, you could select it at this point in the boot sequence.
NTLDR will also load any device drivers that have a start value (again from the Registry) of 0x0.
If you add the switch /SOS in the boot.ini, you will be able to see the drivers listed on the screen as they are loaded.
At this point all of these files have been loaded into memory.