What is a boot sector?
The boot sector is the first sector on a floppy disk. On a hard disk it is the first sector of a partition. It contains information about the disk or partition, such as the number of sectors, plus a small program. When the PC starts up it attempts to read the boot sector of a disk in drive A:. If this fails because there is no disk it reads the boot sector of drive C:. A boot sector virus replaces this sector with its own code and usually moves the original elsewhere on the disk. Even a non-bootable floppy disk has executable code in its boot sector. This displays the “not bootable” message when the computer attempts to boot from the disk. Therefore, non-bootable floppies can still contain a virus and infect a PC if it is inserted in drive A: when the PC starts up. FDISK /MBR will not change the code in a hard disk boot sector (as opposed to the partition sector). Most boot sector viruses infect the partition sector of hard disks and floppy disk boot sectors: most do not infect the boo
A boot sector is the portion of a hard disk or floppy disk that has the code stored on it to boot special programs, and to reference other key features to keep the disk working. There are many types of boot sectors, but there are two main ones: the master boot record and the volume boot record. A master boot sector exists on a drive that has been partitioned, and it usually finds the active partition and run its own volume boot record. The volume boot record, in turn, often contains code to run the operating system on the computer. Hard disk drives contain a master boot record as their first boot sector, while floppy disks or USB disks usually only contain a volume boot record as their first boot sector, as they cannot be partitioned. The BIOS of a computer, the part that runs before anything else, immediately looks to the boot sector of a drive, whether it is a master boot record or a volume boot record, for instructions on what to do next. The boot sector can actually include instruc
Video Transcript What Is a Boot Sector? Hi I’m Jonathan Ayres with “Network for Success” and today we are going to talk about what is a boot sector? A boot sector refers to the hard drive on your computer. All computers have a hard drive and on the hard drive is where the operating system resides. Most people would be familiar with an operating system being Windows like Windows XP or Windows Vista. Now you have to install the operating system on your hard drive in order for you to have a computer that you can operate with your desktop and your applications and so forth so on a hard drive you install the operating system. Now here’s an example of a hard drive right here and this hard drive has inside of it right where this circle is a number of platters made out of iron and other materials and these platters are where the information is stored and where the hard drive is stored stores the information. On the platters we have areas if you’ll think about it that are closer to the center a
