Structure of the configuration program Boot-US
The configuration program Boot-US determines all partitions on all local hard disks
as soon as it starts. This information is obtained by analysing
the partition tables of all partition sectors
on each local hard disk.
Then all partitions found are displayed with some important data.
This data is obtained by Boot-US from the standard partition tables
Boot-US recognizes and handles all operating system partitions. Hence
Boot-US is not restricted only to DOS or Windows partitions. When new partitions
are created, changed or deleted all modifications are automatically visible
at the next startup of Boot-US or after a manual refresh of the display. It
is not necessary to restart the PC to see the changes.
When the configuration program Boot-US is started, no data on any disk sectors
are changed. Disk sectors are written only when the boot manager
Boot-US is installed or when the partition tables are modified.
Inside Boot-US all read or write access to disk sectors happens directly
under Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008. Switching to DOS mode is not required at all. Especially,
with Windows 95/98/ME direct disk access is not easy to achieve. There are limited
number of programs which are able to do that. As a result, reading the partition tables
and potential modifications happen in the same program (Boot-US). Additionally,
the Windows 95/98/ME and NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 version of Boot-US are identical, except for the code
for direct disk access. All these measures increase the stability of
Boot-US and minimize the number of errors.
The configuration program Boot-US uses internally only the LBA format for
addressing the disk sectors. All high-level operations employ the LBA format.
CHS sector numbers are used only for the low-level direct disk access under
Windows 95/98/ME when the extended INT 13h is not supported. In this case the LBA
sectors numbers are converted to the CHS format before the disk sectors
are accessed by the low-level INT 13h functions.
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