Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- what_is_an_mbr [2018/04/19 15:03]
– gurce
+++ what_is_an_mbr [2018/04/19 22:02] (current)
– [What is an MBR?] gurce
@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 Now, the reason why I referred to the MBR before as being 'optional' was due to the following case.
-What it if we just want a single partition to expand the entire disk's contents. Well, there are two ways of specifying this:
+What it if we just want a single partition to span the entire disk's contents. Well, there are two ways of specifying this:
-  * Have an MBR that specifies just a single partition that spans the entire disk
+  * Have an MBR that specifies just a single partition that spans the entire disk (apart from the first 512 bytes needed for the MBR)
   * Omit the MBR, and just let the single partition span the entire disk (including the first 512 bytes where the MBR would have been)
@@ Line 31: / Line 31: @@
 ====== How can I tell if my USB stick has an MBR or not ======
-Being a techy guy, I tend to figure this out by using linux tools like dd and hexdump, to assess the first bytes of the drive, with a line such as this:
+Being a techy guy, I tend to figure this out by using linux tools like dd and hexdump, to assess the first 512 bytes of the drive, with a line such as this:
 ''dd if=/dev/disk2 bs=1 count=512 2> /dev/null | hexdump -C -v | less''