Partcopying a CD bootsector?

[Joe]

I can't find any good documentation on partcopy. Anyhow, I want to copy sector 0 (thats 1 for non-zero-based literate people =p) to a file, for.. educational purposes.

Can anyone help?

[MyndFyre]

You have dd?

Windows?  http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite/dd.htm

Also, you might be interested in the El Torito Bootable CD-ROM Format Specification v1.0.

Google is amazing....

[Joe]

Eh, I've always used partcopy for writing/reading single sectors. I'll check it out tomorrow after school. Thanks MyndFyre!

[mfqr]

excuse me for intruding, but since this is concerning a bootsector, shouldnt this be in the OS dev forums?

[MyndFyre]

Who said it's about OS Development?  He just wants to read a bootsector.

FYI Joe, the CD ROM bootsector will be identical to a floppy disk bootsector; the boot code to enable CD ROM booting is in the BIOS.

dd is good for reading/writing to any block device.  I basically dd'd with if=/dev/hda to copy my entire hard drive, MBR and everything.

[mfqr]

oh i thought he wanted to write his own boot sector to a floppy...

[Joe]

Well, this is OS Development, to a degree. I'm disassembling the Windows XP bootloader to see how it works. =)

[MyndFyre]

Why not just load up the ntldr file?