What is MBR Partition?

MBR stands for – Master Boot Record. It is a partitioning scheme for storage medium of our computer system typically an HDD or SSD. It consist of crucial information to load the operating system and also locate partitions of the storage medium.

• MBR contains information about hard disk partitions, it also contains program which tells how to load the operating system.
• It is a term that represents the first sector of the storage medium.
• It uses 32-bit logical block address and allocates 512 bytes per unit of partitions which limits its capacity only up to 2 TB (Tera Bytes).

How Does MBR Work?

• The computer system is turned on, it loads the BIOS from ROM(Read Only Memory)
• BIOS contains the code to locate and execute the MBR and other partitions on hard disk.
• Now the control shifts to the MBR and it loads the OS and other hardware devices of our PC.

Limitations

• Disk Capacity: MBR can only handle up to 2 TB of data.
• No in-built error detection: Unlike GPT it doesn’t have any inbuilt mechanism for error detection which can lead to data corruption
• Compatibility with Legacy BIOS: Unified Extensive Firmware (UEFI) is slowly replacing the BIOS, hence its generally compatible with older computers.

A partitioning scheme in an operating system is a way of structuring and organizing data and partitions in the computer’s storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD) or solid-state drives (SDD).

“To simply put, before we can allocate, store and manipulate data on our storage medium, we need to partition it. We can define the partitioning by using these partitioning schemes”

In this article, we’ll look at two commonly used partitioning schemes in OS: Master Boot Record (MBR) and GUID Partition Table (GPT).