When the ill fated Itanium was introduced, Intel needed a new boot scheme (due to the limitations of BIOS mentioned above). BIOS is only compatible with x86 compatible CPUs. This and the sector at a time disk i/o results in a very slow first stage boot process. If you install 64Bit Windows on a BIOS booting system, the first stage of the boot process will require the CPU to operate in an 8086 compatible mode ( ). It is intimately associated with the real mode x86 instruction set. The associated booting scheme is known as BIOS (also known as legacy by EFI firmware). The MBR scheme can only address 2TB of storage and supports a maximum of 4 bootable partitions. There is also a flag to indicate which partition contains the files required to continue the boot process. Each table entry contains the location of the partition and the partition (filesystem) type. This sector contains the partition table and executable code used to bootstrap the loading of the Operating System. MBR refers directly to a special boot sector located at the very beginning of a mass storage device. The older of the two partitioning schemes is Master Boot Record (MBR). There are many schemes to partition a disk, however MBR and GPT are the two found on hardware platforms running Windows. Partitions typically contain filesystems. The partitioning scheme chosen also defines the boot mechanism. To enable multiple volumes to exist on one storage device, it is divided into partitions.
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