A boot flag is a 1-

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

value in a non-extended partition record, within a master boot record. It appears at the beginning of a partition record, as the value 0x80. A value of 0x00 indicates the partition does not have the boot flag set. Any other value is invalid. Its primary function is to indicate to a

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

/ MS Windows-type

boot loader A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader or called boot manager and bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer. When a computer is turned off, its softwareincluding operating systems, application code, a ...

which partition to boot. In some cases it is used by Windows XP/2000 to assign the active partition the letter "C:". The active partition is the partition where the boot flag is set. DOS and Windows allow only one boot partition to be set with the boot flag. Other

s used by third-party

boot manager A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader or called boot manager and bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer. When a computer is turned off, its softwareincluding operating systems, application code, a ...

s (such as

GRUB Grub can refer to Grub (larva), of the beetle superfamily Scarabaeoidea, or as a slang term for food. It can also refer to: Places * Grub, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Switzerland * Grub, St. Gallen, Switzerland * Grub (Amerang), a hamlet in Bavar ...

or XOSL) can be installed to a master boot record and can boot primary or

extended partition An extended boot record (EBR), or extended partition boot record (EPBR), is a descriptor for a logical partition under the common DOS disk drive partitioning system. In that system, when one (and only one) partition record entry in the master boot ...

s, which do not have the boot flag set. There are many

disk editor A disk editor is a computer program that allows its user to read, edit, and write raw data (at character or hexadecimal, byte-levels) on disk drives (e.g., hard disks, USB flash disks or removable media such as a floppy disks); as such, they ...

s that can modify the boot flag, such as Disk Management in Windows, GPartEd in

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

, and

fdisk In computing, the fdisk command-line utility provides disk-partitioning functions, preparatory to defining file systems. fdisk features in the DOS, DR FlexOS, IBM OS/2, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, and in certain ports of FreeBS ...

. Some BIOSes test if the boot flag of at least one partition is set, otherwise they ignore the device in boot-order. Therefore, even if the bootloader does not need the flag, it has to be set to start the boot code from BIOS.

References

{{Reflist Booting

See also

References