On which partition is the MBR?

jj1984

Member
Hi,

When using the old MBR scheme for a hard disk, where is the actual MBR stored?

On what partition?

I ask because apparently, after some inspection, my HD has everything on one huge partition, WIN7 OS, the boot loader, everything.

How can an MBR be on a bootable partition?

That is to ask, how can an MBR be on the same partition as an OS?

The MBR should contain the primary bootloader and a partition table.

The primary bootloader should use the partition table to find a bootable partition and pull the first sector of that partition called the volume boot record (I think) into RAM and run the code there.

That code is basically a second stage bootloader.

Things go on from there.

But the MBR is located on the first sector of the first track of the disk.

I would assume then that the MBR is in the first sector of whatever partition it's on.

So, if the MBR shares a partition with an OS and tries to pull the VBR of that OS into RAM, it should end up pulling itself into RAM and creating some kind of infinite loop.

But this doesn't happen to me.

So what am I missing?
 
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