Path: utzoo!bnr-vpa!bnr-fos!bmers58!mlord
From: mlord@bmers58.UUCP (Mark Lord)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: DOS Structure on Hard Disk - A Question
Keywords: DOS, boot record, FAT, confusion, cold fusion
Message-ID: <180@bmers58.UUCP>
Date: 2 Sep 89 13:58:43 GMT
References: <1626@cod.NOSC.MIL>
Reply-To: mlord@bmers58.UUCP (Mark Lord)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 10

Congratulations, you have just discovered the partition table, which will
preceed the boot sectors on any drive with multiple partitions.  If your 
disk had only a single partition (ie. a 32meg drive with NO partition table)
you would find the boot sectors where you expected them: first on the disk.

The partition table is an add on to allow the physical disk to appear to be
several disks, each of which may have a boot record in the "first sectors".
A flag within the partition table selects which "disk" to really boot from.

-Mark