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From: silver@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Andy Silverman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: DOS Structure on Hard Disk - A Question
Keywords: DOS, boot record, FAT, confusion, cold fusion
Message-ID: <14039@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 2 Sep 89 20:30:11 GMT
References: <1626@cod.NOSC.MIL> <180@bmers58.UUCP>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: silver@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Andy Silverman)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 20

In article <180@bmers58.UUCP> mlord@bmers58.UUCP (Mark Lord) writes:
>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.

This is slightly inaccurate.  There is a partition table located on EVERY
hard disk, whether there is only one partition or not.  If there is only
one partition then there will be only one entry in it, but it will be there
all the same. Otherwise how would the controller figure out whether the first
sector of the drive was a table or a boot sector?  (The table is not made up
of executable code.)



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| Andy Silverman        | Internet:   silver@eniac.seas.upenn.edu |
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