eekee wrote:
Awesome!
But what on Earth is a VBR, and how does it differ from a Partition Boot Record?
(I'm teasing, but also trying to say, "it's not a good idea to be too strict about terminology.")
Oh, you meant that! I though you were referring to the Protective Boot Record
Ok, let's clear things up, this is the terminology I was using:
- Master Boot Record (MBR): 512 bytes, is the first sector of a media, may contain BPB (for FAT floppies or USB sticks) and partitioning table as well (for larger media).
- Protective Master Boot Record (PMBR): 512 bytes, the first sector of a media, contains an old-style partitioning table with an entry to the new-style GPT partitioning table. Might contain a legacy boot code, but not necessarily.
- Partition Boot Record (PBR as you wrote it): the first sector of a partition (which may or may not contain a file system, therefore a volume).
- Volume Boot Record (VBR): 512 bytes, the first sector of a file system volume (regardless if it's on the entire disk or just in one partition). There's no partitioning table in it for sure. For FAT volumes, it contains BPB.
- CDROM Boor Record: 2048 bytes, any sector that's recorded in the Boot Catalog. Does not contain BPB nor partitioning table (unless it's a hybrid boot sector).
The problem here is, these terms are not well defined: you can define them by the sector position: MBR as the first sector of the disk, and VBR as the first sector of a partition. But you can also define them by their contents: first sector is an MBR if there's a partitioning table in it, and VBR if it's the first sector of a volume (that is, contains BPB for a FAT volume). As you can see, these are ambiguous definitions.
However we can conclude that MBR is always the first sector of a disk, PBR is never the first, and VBR could be the first of a disk and first of a partition as well.
I have already said this many times, but floppies can contain partitioning tables, and disks might contain only one file system without partitioning table. There's nothing in BIOS Boot Specification nor in the original MS-DOS code to prevent this, it is merely a choice of the user if they want to slice large media into smaller volumes or not. Windows XP could not handle partitioning tables on USB sticks until SP2 (or 3, my memory is fuzzy about which one, but I'm sure it required an SP). With CDROMs it is a bit clearer, as there can be only one file system on them, and the first 64k is not used at all, which opens up the possibility to create hybrid images.
Cheers,
bzt