Talk:Volume boot record

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] GRUB as an MBR or VBR vs ordinary Volume Boot Records

I just finished 'undoing' an addition by User:Smwikicn2007 in which he called the VBR a 'virtual MBR' on non-partitioned devices. Later, this made me wonder what might have led him to make such a statement. Could it be the fact that GRUB (often found on computers running Linux) can actually be set up to act as either a Volume boot record or a partitioned device's Master boot record? If so, this may have led him to believe that any VBR code could also be thought of as an MBR on bootable devices that do not have a partition, such as floppy diskettes.

GRUB's 512-byte stage1 contents can perform either function, because it was not only created with executable code meant to run correctly after being loaded into memory at 0x7C00 by a master boot record, but also contains the usual 64-byte partition table that many utility programs expect to see in an MBR; especially those on hard disks with a bootable Microsoft operating system. Daniel B. Sedory 07:15, 22 September 2007 (UTC)