Remember, a max of four primary partitions - that is all an MBR can handle. Make your other partitions of sizes you wish, format them with a file system as you wish. Is it DOS you wish to put down? Then the DOS partition must be a FAT one of max size 2GB. = and that is a very brief version of the chain of events! The choices you have made available in boot.ini, and the choice you now make, will direct operations toward the OS you wish to run. Boot.ini will have choices of opsys to load, including your DOS. If your OS is XP then ntldr will be read into RAM and then hunt for boot.ini amongst others.
That particular boot sector's code assumes control and searches for certain files in the root of the partition. The code directs operations to the partition marked as active, specifically to its boot sector.
The MBR's partition table for the whole disk is read, plus the mbr code, and BIOS hands control to that. BIOS whirs, searches for the master boot record on the master disk.
Windows expects/demands to be on the first partition on the master Now I may be way off beam here, explaining what you don't wish to know, but i'll continue. The disk's master boot record will be written at the same time. There will be only one boot sector per volume. When you set up the partition(s) on the disk a boot sector will be written for each volume one, and one only, of them must be marked as active, unless this is a slave disk.
Generally though, XP can handle the building of them, within limits.īootsectors and stuff. XP will only let you format up to 32GB as FAT32, but it will read on a partition much larger - you just gotta set up the partition with other software. You are using XP, and i shall asssume that it will continue to be your main opsys. now when there is a problem with the OS, the user should be able to insert the usb stick and boot thru it (ofcourse, after configuring the bios to boot from this)įirst off, you can put more than one partition on a disk, and you can mix the formats on it to have both NTFS and FAT32, or have several of either all FAT32 or all NTFS. in other words, suppose the user plugs in his usb stick when the system is running fine, a program should automatically be able to make the usb stick bootable, and copy my utility on the stick. im not particular about MS DOS, but im particular about being able to "create" this bootable drive programmatically, without user intervention. The trouble is, i want to do the same thing with usb stick. after that i can execute the utility and assume that it'll do the rest. you can just format the floppy as bootable, then load the "utility" i want on the floppy, then boot thru the floppy. normally, doing this with a floppy drive is time-tested. in case of an OS crash, i need to be able to boot through the usb stick, so that i can run an application that fetches a windows image from elsewhere and re-images the hard drive. well at least with all this disk level stuff. I might sound dumb, but thats bcoz I am dumb :cheesy.
Let me know if that'll work, and if so, could you suggest a software that'll create such partitions (or can it be done using windows?)
As I said earlier, I'm unable to do it coz its too big in size and only NTFS seems to be supported.įrom what you say, I'm wondering if I could try partitioning the thumb drive, and make one partition small enough to FAT format it (?), and then run mkbt on that partition. So now, to test if this really works, I have to FAT format the usb drive.
Again, mkbt can handle it - provided the thumb drive has the same file format (FAT). So the floppy is now FAT formatted, contains some files and bootsector, can load DOS if I boot using the floppy disk.Ģ) I used mkbt tool to extract the bootsector info from this floppy and dumped it into a file.ģ) Now I have to inject this bootsector (from the file I just dumped it into) into the thumb drive. Here is what I did -ġ) On XP, I formatted a floppy with the "create boot disk" option set. I'm actually developing a utility that'll inject bootsectors into USB drive. I'm not doing this for maintaining my home pc. however there is a few things that I need to focus on, so let me throw some more details.