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In computing, the BIOS parameter block, often shortened to BPB, is a data structure in the volume boot record (VBR) describing the physical layout of a data storage volume. On partitioned devices, such as hard disks , the BPB describes the volume partition, whereas, on unpartitioned devices, such as floppy disks , it describes the entire medium.
A block, a contiguous number of bytes, is the minimum unit of storage that is read from and written to a disk by a disk driver.The earliest disk drives had fixed block sizes (e.g. the IBM 350 disk storage unit (of the late 1950s) block size was 100 six-bit characters) but starting with the 1301 [8] IBM marketed subsystems that featured variable block sizes: a particular track could have blocks ...
UEFI support in Windows began in 2008 with Windows Vista SP1. [22] The Windows boot manager is located at the \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\ subfolder of the EFI system partition. [23] On Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and later, access to the EFI system partition is obtained by running the mountvol command. Mounts the EFI system partition on the specified drive.
Before Windows 7, the system and boot partitions were, by default, the same and were given the "C:" drive letter. [7]: 971 Since Windows 7, however, Windows Setup creates, by default, a separate system partition that is not given an identifier and therefore is hidden. The boot partition is still given "C:" as its identifier.
B: — Reserved for a second floppy drive (that was present on many PCs). C: — First hard disk drive partition. D: to Z: — Other disk partitions get labeled here. Windows assigns the next free drive letter to the next drive it encounters while enumerating the disk drives on the system. Drives can be partitioned, thereby creating more drive ...
[10] A single partition of type EEh, encompassing the entire GPT drive (where "entire" actually means as much of the drive as can be represented in an MBR), is indicated and identifies it as GPT. Operating systems and tools which cannot read GPT disks will generally recognize the disk as containing one partition of unknown type and no empty ...
The FAT file system is a file system used on MS-DOS and Windows 9x family of operating systems. [3] It continues to be used on mobile devices and embedded systems, and thus is a well-suited file system for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from 1981 through to the present.
On IBM PC compatible machines, the BIOS is ignorant of the distinction between VBRs and MBRs, and of partitioning. The firmware simply loads and runs the first sector of the storage device. [3] If the device is a floppy or USB flash drive, that will be a VBR. If the device is a hard disk, that will be an MBR.