[Gllug] Partioning advice needed

[Pete Ryland]

On 16/02/07, Mike Brodbelt <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> 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, I stand corrected.  For some reason, I'd thought that it was more
IBM than MS in the partition table design.  It seems the only part of
the sector it looks at is the two-byte signature.  I even checked the
int 13 docs, which indeed don't interpret partition tables as I
thought I remembered they did!

Cheers,
Pete
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug