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Boot Record

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by chas2

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The boot record is installed in a different
partition than the operating system. Is
there a way to copy the boot record to the
partition where the operating system is, so
that the old partition can be deleted?

6 replies

by maxwell edison

Greetings,

The Master Boot Record (MBR) is, by definition, the sector at cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1 of any hard disk. An MBR is created by the FDISK program. The FDISK program of all operating systems must create a functionally similar MBR. TheMBR is first of what could be many partition sectors, each one containing a four entry partition table.

Without this separate and unique Master Boot Record, the hard disk would be "unbootable". Therefore, it cannot be moved into the partition that holds your operating system.

The MBR does not have a "drive letter" assigned to it. If you have what appears to be two partitions, C-Drive and D-Drive, for example, neither one of those partitions contains the MBR. And if that is indeed the case, the safest way to manipulate your partitions without losing data is with the program "Partition Magic".

Good luck,

Maxwell

by maxwell edison

.
.
For a greater understand of the hard drive, cut and paste this link. (REMOVE SPACES if they snuck into the pasted URL):

http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/

Look through the index tree for scores of links to specific sections of that reference.

And the specific section on the Boot Sector:

http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/geom/tracksSkew.html

Regards,

Maxwell

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