Answer by adrian for What makes a floppy disk bootable?
Short answer: A magic number (0xAA55) being at the end of the first sector on the floppy.Slightly longer answer: "Booting" means that the first 512 bytes of the floppy are copied to memory (usually at...
View ArticleAnswer by rackandboneman for What makes a floppy disk bootable?
Addon, answering an aspect explicitly asked about in the question.A "dd image" of a complete floppy disk, unless dd is used with special (skip/count) parameters, will always carry the parts that make a...
View ArticleAnswer by RonJohn for What makes a floppy disk bootable?
what about the image makes it bootable?An operating system "kernel" sitting at track 0 sector 0.EDIT: if "data", or a program that doesn't have the necessary code to finish booting the system, is at...
View ArticleAnswer by Jules for What makes a floppy disk bootable?
The notion of a bootable-vs-non-bootable floppy is a little odd. It's worth noting that almost all floppies you're likely to have are actually bootable: it's just that they boot a program that isn't...
View ArticleAnswer by Raffzahn for What makes a floppy disk bootable?
what about the image makes it bootable?The program(s loader) starts at Track 0 Sector 0 of a deviceI'm interested in making my own bootable floppy images for an IBM PCWrite the program to be executed...
View ArticleWhat makes a floppy disk bootable?
A lot of web sites describe how to create a bootable floppy disk using an existing image (via dd). But what about the image makes it bootable?I'm interested in making my own bootable floppy images for...
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