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Microsoft: FAQs on Using GPT disks in Windows; Microsoft Technet: How Basic Disks and Volumes Work A bit MS-specific but good figures relate GPT to older MBR format and protective-MBR, shows layouts of complete disks, and how to interpret partition-table hexdumps. Apple Developer Connection: Secrets of the GPT
There is some MBR replacement code that emulates EFI firmware's bootstrap, which makes non-EFI machines capable of booting from disks using the GPT partitioning scheme. It detects a GPT, places the processor in the correct operating mode, and loads the EFI compatible code from disk to complete this task.
On MBR disks, such boot loaders typically use the sectors immediately following the MBR for this storage; that space is usually known as the "MBR gap". No equivalent unused space exists on GPT disks, and the BIOS boot partition is a way to officially allocate such space for use by the boot loader.
The partition type (or partition ID) in a partition's entry in the partition table inside a master boot record (MBR) is a byte value intended to specify the file system the partition contains or to flag special access methods used to access these partitions (e.g. special CHS mappings, LBA access, logical mapped geometries, special driver access, hidden partitions, secured or encrypted file ...
This is analogous to the conversion from partition types 0x01, 0x04, 0x06, 0x07, 0x0B, 0x0C, and 0x0E to partition type 0x42 on MBR partitioned disks. Linux used the same partition type GUID for basic data partition as Windows prior to introduction of a Linux specific Data Partition GUID 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4 .
Usually, the first sector of the hard disk is the boot sector, regardless of sector size (512 or 4096 bytes) and partitioning flavor (MBR or GPT). The purpose of defining one particular sector as the boot sector is inter-operability between firmware and various operating systems.
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On system with BIOS firmware, the BIOS invokes MBR boot code from a hard disk drive at startup. The MBR boot code and the VBR boot code are OS-specific. In Microsoft Windows, the MBR boot code tries to find an active partition (the MBR is only 512 bytes), then executes the VBR boot code of an active partition.