Boot sector

A boot sector is a region of a hard disk, floppy disk, optical disc, or other data storage device that contains machine code to be loaded into random-access memory (RAM) by a computer system's built-in firmware. The purpose of a boot sector is to allow the boot process of a computer to load a program (usually, but not necessarily, an operating system) stored on the same storage device. The location and size of the boot sector (perhaps corresponding to a logical disk sector) is specified by the design of the computing platform.

On an IBM PC compatible machine, the BIOS selects a boot device, then copies the first sector from the device (which may be a MBR, VBR or any executable code), into physical memory at memory address 0x7C00. On other systems, the process may be quite different.

Several major kinds of boot sectors could be encountered on the IBM PC compatible hard disks, floppy disks and similar storage devices:

The presence of an IBM PC compatible boot loader for x86-CPUs in the boot sector is by convention indicated by a two-byte hexadecimal sequence 0x55 0xAA (called the boot sector signature) at the end of the boot sector (offsets 0x1FE and 0x1FF). This signature indicates the presence of at least a dummy boot loader which is safe to be executed, even if it may not be able to actually load an operating system. It does not indicate a particular (or even the presence of) file system or operating system, although some old versions of DOS 3 relied on it in their process to detect FAT-formatted media (newer versions do not). Boot code for other platforms or CPUs should not use this signature, since this may lead to a crash when the BIOS passes execution to the boot sector assuming that it contains valid executable code. Nevertheless, some media for other platforms erroneously contain the signature, anyway, rendering this check not 100% reliable in practice.

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