Patent ID: 8453260

Claim:
An image forming apparatus, comprising: a main body portion of the image forming apparatus; and at least one replaceable unit which is mountable to the main body portion of the image forming apparatus to execute an image forming operation, wherein the main body portion of the image forming apparatus comprises a main controller to control operations of the image forming apparatus, wherein the at least one replaceable unit comprises: a memory unit to store information regarding the at least one replaceable unit and to store a second initialization program different from a first initialization program, the first initialization program used in the main body of the image forming apparatus to perform an initialization, and a central processing unit (CPU) which is coupled to the memory unit, wherein, when the at least one replaceable unit is mounted to the image forming apparatus, the CPU is initialized using the second initialization program stored in the memory unit of the at least one replaceable unit, the CPU configured to access the information stored in the memory unit and to perform authentication of the at least one replaceable unit based on a result of the second initialization by interacting with the main controller of the image forming apparatus.