Operating System Boot Process.

Hard Disk and Partitions:Partitioning is a process of dividing the Hard disk into several chunks, and use any one of the partition to install OS or use two or more partitions to install multiple OSes. But you can always have one partition, and use up the entire Hard disk space to install a single OS, but this will become data management nightmare for users of large Hard disks. This is where advantage of partitioning lie! Now, because of the structure of the Master Boot Record (MBR), you can have only four partitions, and these four partitions are called Primary Partitions. Again, If we have a large hard disk, we can not have only four primary partitions, hence Extended Partition is introduced. This Extended Partition is not a usable partition by itself, but its like a container and it is used to hold Logical Drives! That is this Extended Partition can be subdivided into multiple logical partitions. In order to boot into a Partition, it must be designated as bootable partition or Active Partition. Active Partition is that partition which is flagged as bootable or which contains OS, this is generally a Primary Partition.

Boot Records: Master, Partition, Extended, Logical Extended:Master Boot Record (MBR):- MBR is a small 512 bytes partition which is at the first physical sector of the hard disk. The location is denoted as CHS 0,0,1 meaning 0th Cylinder, 0th Head and 1st Sector. MBR contains a small program known as bootstrap program which is responsible for booting into any OSes. MBR also contains a table known as Partition Table. This Partition Table is a table which lists the available Primary Partitions in the hard disk. So it can have only four entries. This rises another question, what if we have more than four partitions? This is solved by Extended Partition principle. Partition Table considers whole Extended Partition as one Primary partition and lists it in the table! So a Partition Table can have two possible entries:1. up to 4 Primary Partitions . 2. up to 3 Primary Partitions and 1 Extended Partition.(Total not exceeding 4) . Partition Boot Sector (PBR):- This is the logical first sector, that is sector at the start of a Primary Partition. This is also 512 byte area, which contains some programs to initialize or run OS files.All Primary Partitions have its own PBRs.

Extended Boot Sector (EBR):- This is the logical first sector, that is the sector at the start of the Extended Partition. This EBR contains a Partition Table, which lists the available Logical Partitions inside Extended Partition. That is it contains the Starting addresses of each Logical Partitions. Logical Extended Boot Sector (LEBR):- This is the logical first sector residing at the start of each Logical Partition. This is similar to PBR for Primary Partitions.