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A boot disk is a removable digital data storage medium from which a computer can load and run an operating system or utility program. [1] The computer must have a built-in program which will load and execute a program from a boot disk meeting certain standards.
The boot partition (or boot volume) [5] is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root or %systemroot% in Windows NT. [6]: 174 Before Windows 7, the system and boot partitions were, by default, the same and were given the "C:" drive letter.
A boot sector is the sector of a persistent data storage device (e.g., hard disk, floppy disk, optical disc, etc.) which contains machine code to be loaded into random-access memory (RAM) and then executed by a computer system's built-in firmware (e.g., the BIOS).
A master boot record (MBR) is a type of boot sector in the first block of partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond.
GRUB 2, elilo and systemd-boot serve as conventional, full-fledged standalone UEFI boot managers (a.k.a. bootloader managers) for Linux. Once loaded by a UEFI firmware, they can access and boot kernel images from all devices, partitions and file systems they support, without being limited to the EFI system partition.
Note: The column MBR (Master Boot Record) refers to whether or not the boot loader can be stored in the first sector of a mass storage device. The column VBR (Volume Boot Record) refers to the ability of the boot loader to be stored in the first sector of any partition on a mass storage device.
A bootable MBR device is defined as one that can be read from, and where the last two bytes of the first sector contain the little-endian word AA55h, [nb 6] found as byte sequence 55h, AAh on disk (also known as the MBR boot signature), or where it is otherwise established that the code inside the sector is executable on x86 PCs.
If the actual size of the disk exceeds the maximum partition size representable using the legacy 32-bit LBA entries in the MBR partition table, the recorded size of this partition is clipped at the maximum, thereby ignoring the rest of the disk. This amounts to a maximum reported size of 2 TiB, assuming a disk with 512 bytes per sector (see 512e).