Network, Computer and Programming Resources

Fat32 - Boot Sector and BPB

The first important data structure on a FAT volume is called the BPB (BIOS Parameter Block), which is located in the first sector of the volume in the Reserved Region. This sector is sometimes called the “boot sector” or the “reserved sector” or the “0th sector,” but the important fact is simply that it is the first sector of the volume. This is the first thing about the FAT file system that sometimes causes confusion. In MS-DOS version 1.x, there was not a BPB in the boot sector. In this first version of the FAT file system, there were only two different formats, the one for single-sided and the one for double-sided 360K 5.25-inch floppy disks. The determination of which type was on the disk was done by looking at the first byte of the FAT (the low 8 bits of FAT[0]). This type of media determination was superseded in MS-DOS version 2.x by putting a BPB in the boot sector, and the old style of media determination (done by looking at the first byte of the FAT) was no longer supported. All FAT volumes must have a BPB in the boot sector. This brings us to the second point of confusion relating to FAT volume determination: What exactly does a BPB look like? The BPB in the boot sector defined for MS-DOS 2.x only allowed for a FAT volume with strictly less than 65,536 sectors (32 MB worth of 512-byte sectors). This limitation was due to the fact that the “total sectors” field was only a 16-bit field. This limitation was addressed by MS-DOS 3.x, where the BPB was modified to include a new 32-bit field for the total sectors value. The next BPB change occurred with the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system, specifically OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2), where the FAT32 type was introduced. FAT16 was limited by the maximum size of the FAT and the maximum valid cluster size to no more than a 2 GB volume if the disk had 512-byte sectors. FAT32 addressed this limitation on the amount of disk space that one FAT volume could occupy so that disks larger than 2 GB only had to have one partition defined. The FAT32 BPB exactly matches the FAT12/FAT16 BPB up to and including the BPB_TotSec32 field. They differ starting at offset 36, depending on whether the media type is FAT12/FAT16 or FAT32 (see discussion below for determining FAT type). The relevant point here is that the BPB in the boot sector of a FAT volume should always be one that has all of the new BPB fields for either the FAT12/FAT16 or FAT32 BPB type. Doing it this way ensures the maximum compatibility of the FAT volume and ensures that all FAT file system drivers will understand and support the volume properly, because it always contains all of the currently defined fields.