What is the boot sector?

The Boot Sector is the first sector of a disk. Track 0 and side 0. A valid Boot sector would have the word 0x0AA55 at offset 510. On an IBM PC, after performing POST, the BIOS routines look for a valid Boot Sector. If it finds one, it loads it (the whole 512 bytes) into memory at address 0x7C00 and jumps to this code at address address 0:7C00h, that is the CS register contains a 0000h and the IP contains 7C00h. So what ever code you put in there executes.

AG00282_.GIF (2198 bytes)

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PIE Software Inc. 08/04/2003


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