Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think!husc6!m2c!wpi!jhallen
From: jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
Subject: Partitioning question
Message-ID: <8762@wpi.wpi.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 90 22:20:54 GMT
Reply-To: jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen)
Organization: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester ,MA
Lines: 18


This newsgroup appeared just in time!

I'm making an MS-DOS clone and I need to understand exactly how the
partitioning works.  I know that:  the first sector of the harddrive is a boot
program which loads in the boot sector of the active partition.  This sector
supports 4 partitions.  So that a disk can have many partitions, the "extended
dos" partition has a partitioning system of its own.  The question:  How does
the real boot sector (the one on the active partition) know the parameters for
it's partition?  And, in the extended partition, how does MS-DOS know the
parameters for each sub-partition?  One book I looked in didn't say.  Another
book said that a copy of the partition entry for that partition resides in
each partition's boot sector.  This sounds reasonable- except that it's not
true.  None of the boot sectors on any partition seem to have a partition
entry.
-- 
            "Come on Duke, lets do those crimes" - Debbie
"Yeah... Yeah, lets go get sushi... and not pay" - Duke