Bootloader: Difference between revisions

The bits of your kernel are somewhere on some disk (presumably the booting disk, but this is not mandatory). Question is: where on the disk? Is it a regular file on a [[FAT|FAT-formatted]] floppypartition? Is it a collection of consecutive sectors in the "reserved area" of the FAT12FAT floppyfile system (in which case you may need a dedicated tool to format the disk and install the kernel on it)? Or is the floppydisk / partition simply left unformatted and the kernel pasted directly with a disk image tool?

All the above options are possible. Maybe the one I'd choose myself would be to reserve enough space on a FAT12FAT floppyfile system to store the list of sectors used by the kernel file. The field reserved sectors in the BPB is a perfect place for this. The "advantage" of being fully-FAT12FAT is that you don't need to re-write the bootsector every time you rewrite the kernel.