bbrantley

I have built an OS image (Windows CE 6.0) and have been successful using Visual Studio 2005 w/ platform builder. I have been doing a lot of reading on the boot process and how the processor loads the OS into memory to be executed. I have read some about the master boot record (MBR) and while most of it makes sense, there are a couple of things i'm a little fuzzy on.

As far as I understand the boot process, the bios runs through the boot list to check for boot sectors on the devices listed. Let's say we have an os on an IDE drive. That IDE has to have a boot sector (MBR) in the first sector of memory with a boot sector signature at the end of that sector, correct? sorry about all of the sectors, ha. If that is the case, the MBR points to the active partition on the drive. I assume the memory location in the MBR points to the first memory location of the partition? Again, if that is the case, the instructions to load the OS are located at that memory address?

Assuming all of the above is correct, how can I make a usb drive bootable and just slap an OS image on it (no telling what memory location it is stored at) and the PC can boot the OS? I guess the link i'm missing is how the MBR points to a memory location and the OS image has a certain name (nk.bin), but you don't where the drive is storing it when you copy it over. Or must one make sure to store the nk.bin file at a predetermined memory location?

I'm sorry for bouncing all over the place with this post, but I have some questions I can't find anywhere else and I have to understand something before I can move on from it.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated

Best regards,

B