Boot Sectors

The POST is designed to detect faults in the system (no display, no keyboard, etc) and look for a bootable device (floppy, scsi, hard disk, cdrom)

In modern machnes you can set the order the BIOS determins what to boot from, "A, C, CDROM / C Only / CDROM, C, A" etc.

Back in the "old" days, the BIOS would first look for a floppy disk in drive A: and then it would look in drive C:.

Once the BIOS finds a boot sector with a bootable ID (0x55, 0xAA), it loads it into memory at a specifically set location, 0x0000:0x7C00, segment 0x0000, address 0x7C00.

Once the sector is loaded, execution starts at this address.

BIOS, all being made by different manufacturers, set its registers up differently according to who its maker is. *NEVER* assume what the contents of registers might be, for example, NEVER assume that DS/SS/ES etc will be initialised to 0 because not all bios do this. (and this has caught many people unawares!)

Floppy disks and hard disks boot differently. There are slight differences in the way they go about things.

Floppies are pretty simple, the BIOS loads the bootsector into 0x0000:0x7C00 and proceeds to execute it. Its a one step process.

A hard disk is different. A hard disk has an MBR (Master Boot Record), this is because a hard disk can have multiple partitions and any one of them can be bootable.

The BIOS loads the MBR (sector 0 of the hard disk) into memory at 0x0000:0x7C00 and executes it, now typically (ie: there is no standard) that sector moves its code down to 0x0000:0x0600 area and continues to execute itself from there.

Once it has moved itself, it will proceed to scan the partition table for a bootable partition. When it finds a bootable partition it loads the first sector of that partition into 0x0000:0x7C00 and executes it. (Now you see why it moves its code down!)

The entire process is quite simple. But things get much harder when you decide you want your bootsector to load a file or an operating system kernel.

(see the examples bootr01.zip and smbmbr03.zip)

Master Boot Record

The MBR contains a table of four entries that are used for what is known as Primary Partitions.

This table is filled in by the disk paritioning programs such as FDisk and Disk Druid, etc.

The layout of this table corresponds to;

Offset    Size (bytes)    Description
0x00           1          Boot Indicator (0x80=bootable, 0x00=not bootable)
0x01           1          Starting Head Number
0x02           2          Starting Cylinder Number (10 bits) and Sector (6 bits)
0x04           1          Descriptor (Type of partition/filesystem)
0x05           1          Ending Head Number
0x06           2          Ending Cylinder and Sector numbers
0x08           4          Starting Sector (relative to begining of disk)
0x0C           4          Number of Sectors in partition

(see the examples bootr01.zip and smbmbr03.zip)