Is the empty bootsector just a series of zeros?

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rliuap
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Apr 07, 2012 8:35 am

Is the empty bootsector just a series of zeros?

Post by rliuap »

Is the empty bootsector just a series of zeros that makes up the first sector of the device? Is it an equivalent to what dd does as in the following unix command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 ?

What is the consequence of restoring this image of 512 bytes to the SUB drive? Does it make the drive partitionless, that is, like a floppy drive with no partition at all?

Usually, if one wants to see the new content of a drive that has been DD-imaged from an image file, the drive must be unplugged and replugged in. Do I have to do the same with USB Image Tool? It seems that I can see the contents with USB Image Tool without unplugging/replugging. Is this always true? What is the trick? Why I have to do this with dd?

Thanks!
Alex
Site Admin
Posts: 272
Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:59 pm

Re: Is the empty bootsector just a series of zeros?

Post by Alex »

Yes, it zeroes the first 512 bytes. By that, the drive appears partitionless. USB drives usually are formatted without partition tables (called Superfloppy format).After that, you have to reformat the drive, I recommend the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (just google for it, it's freeware as well). The refresh of the drive is done by unmounting/remounting it using the way it's provided by the Windows API. I don't know, why dd doesn't do that, probably because it's a Linux/Unix port and just doesn't have this feature (uveryfied by me).
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