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

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Wed Feb 23 13:07:33 PST 2005


Andrea Mazzoleni wrote:
> 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.
> 

Interesting approach.  The big problem is that with a FAT32 superblock 
and a partition table, there is very little space left.  I'd be 
interested in looking at your code.

	-hpa




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