First bought a hard drive, we have no way to use, you need to partition and format it, then install the operating system then it can use. A complete hard drive data should include five parts: MBR, DBR, FAT, DIR area and the DATA area. Only the main boot sector is the only, the other as you increase the number of partitions increased.
    Master boot sector is located in the hard disk cylinder 0 track 0 sector 1, including the hard disk master boot record MBR (Main Boot Record) and partition table DPT (Disk Partition Table). The role of master boot record is to check the partition table is correct or not and to determine which partition to boot partition, and the end of the process at the time of the partition boot program (that is, the operating system boot sector) transferred to the memory implementation. As for the partition table, many people know, 80H, or 00H for the commencement of signs to mark, 55AAH to end, a total of 64 bytes, located at the end of this sector.
It is worth mentioning that, MBR is produced by partition program (such as DOS-Fdisk.exe), and different operating systems may be not have the same sector. If you have this intention, you can write one, as long as it can complete the tasks mentioned above, which is the reason why the system can achieve multi-boot (To be beside the point: Just because the master boot record easy to write, there have a lot of boot sector viruses).
