[Gllug] Partioning advice needed

Chris Bell chrisbell at overview.demon.co.uk
Fri Feb 16 14:23:12 UTC 2007


On Fri 16 Feb, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> 

> 
> No it isn't - the BIOS carries out the POST and hardware initialisation,
> then it loads sector 0, track 0 of the first fixed disk (or floppy, or
> thing that emulates a floppy) at 0x7c00 IIRR, and passes control to it.
> The BIOS has no knowledge of partition tables whatsoever. That sector
> must contain a program that is capable of starting the bootstrap
> process, but that's all. The bootsector structures, and (in the case of
> a fixed partitionable disk) the partition table structure, were defined
> by MS-DOS. The bootsector came first, as early DOS releases didn't
> support hard disks, and initially didn't support partitioning them.
> 

> 
> Yes, this was another in a long chain of hacks necessitated by hard
> disks growing faster than people thought they would. A 12-bit FAT
> doesn't go that far before your cluster size starts getting really wasteful.
> 
> Mike

Is this affected by different ways of addressing discs, such as CHS and LBA?

-- 
Chris Bell

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