Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Disk Storage Technology

If a hard drive is partitioned, the first sector is a Master Boot Record. If it is not partitioned, it is called a Volume Boot Record. MBR's are used for:

Holding a partition table

Booting the operating system

Giving each disk a 32-bit signature

The MBR is not part of any partition.

For more information on MBR's, including how to repair a broken one or creating your own with a disk editing utility, see Wikipedia's article.

4 comments:

Kevin said...

What about virus and MBR?

Kevin said...

Can a system boot without a MBR?

QT said...

I can remember dealing with viruses that corrupted the MBR, and BIOS's having a "virus protection" that would flash the screen and ask for a conformation before modifying the MBR, but it seems like no common viruses today target the MBR. Probably due to increased security.

It is possible to boot without an MBR - EFI uses a GPT or Guid Partition Table, which 64-bit computers often use. A GPT is nice because it's written at the beginning AND end of the drive for redundancy.

Abe said...

So is it possible to partition a drive, put Vista 64-bit on one partition, Vista 32-bit on the other partition, and be able to switch OSs without restarting your computer and switching the Master every time? If you are wondering why I want to do this, it's so I can print with my HP Laserjet 1000. 64-bit drivers do not exist for lots of HP printers, as explained here:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00439068&lang=en&cc=us

Lesson learned: Don't buy HP products, as they will not be supported for long.