[syslinux] makebootfat: an utility to create bootable USB disks

Andrea Mazzoleni amadvance at gmail.com
Wed Feb 23 11:33:56 PST 2005


On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:47:46 +0100, Paolo Salvan
<paolo.salvan at xvision.it> wrote:
> it isn't clear to me instead how can it be compatible with
> floppy also, as AFAIK it has a different way to handle boot sector and
> boot process...
I'm using a MBR sector which pretend to be also a FAT boot sector. The
two sector formats are not incompatible. You can put a FAT descriptor
and a partition table in the same sector because they are placed in
different ranges.

So an USB-FDD BIOS can see a FAT boot sector and an USB-HDD can see a
MBR with a partition table.

For example in Linux the resulting device can be mounted as /dev/sda
and also as /dev/sda1.

-- 
Andrea Mazzoleni
935A 2D3C 5C70 BCD6 CB0C  ED89 7C19 4321 6340 3F6D




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