is there an Boot Sector or Partition Table on usb flash disk?

There are only 512-byte sectors on any kind of disk ( flask, hard, RAM)

The file system dictates how the sectors are used.

If you are asking about FAT files system, then yes there _must_ be a Boot Sector _and_ a Partition Table.

This may help:

Google for FAT16 or FAT32 for further information and code samples.

donald

The partition table holds the information which file system is used in a partition, and so I understand that there always is a partition table on media that (other than floppy and iso-CD) can be formated with different file systems. I suppose in Linux there are ways to provide this information in some different way and avoiding the partition table. But why should anybody want to do this ?

A bootsector is present, if you wish so, as well as a partition table. Usually, every usb disk or stick or whatever has a partition table - simply to correspond to the needs of a BIOS or any Microsoft operating system. Using Linux, you can get rid of it (by simply putting your file system into e.g. /dev/hda instead of e.g. /dev/hda2), but this is non-standard.

Take this answer as a "yes" to your question.

Regards, Sebastian

thanks for your answer , i have make sure that there are boot sector on the usb flash disk, and i used dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 to read the boot sector

"Sebastian" ?ÈëÏû?ÐÂÎÅ:4594326b$0$18833$ snipped-for-privacy@newsspool4.arcor-online.net...

What do you mean by "boot sector"? A boot sector is present on every partition of your disk. But the very first sector of the disk contains the master boot record (MBR), which includes the partition table and the code to boot the active partition (i.e. it executes the code of the partition's boot sector).

So I don't know what you want to do with your nice sector image, even if it's the most important sector of your disk.

Regards, Sebastian