Brief introduction to DBR

(1) DBR is located in Cylinder 0, Head 1, and Sector 1 and its logical sector number is0
(2) DBR contains DOS Boot Program and BPB.
(3) BPB is very important and the logical address and physical address can be calculated
by BPB.
All of above are taking DOS (FAT16) for example, although it is not applied nowadays.
However, the location of Track 0, Cylinder 1 and Sector 1 also has the analogous
functions. More precisely, DBR should be renamed as OBR (OS Boot record). For
example, OBR (FAT32 or NTFS) evolved from DBR of DOS. And OBR (DBR) is
generated by advanced format programs such as FORMAT, PM, DM, DISKPART, WINXP,
MiniTool Partition Wizard and so on.
--Source from
http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/data-recover
y/dbr.html

3. FAQ
DBR (DOS BOOT RECORE) is located in Cylinder
0, Head 1 and Sector 1(Logical Sector 0). And it is
divided into two parts: DOS Bootstrapper and BPB
(Parameter block of BIOS). Among them, DOS is
responsible for the location and loading of DOS
system files(IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS) and BPB is
applied to describe disk information in this DOS
partition. BPB is located in 0BH offset of DBR, 13
bytes. It contains the parameters used in logical format, which can provide parameters for
calculation of FAT, initial address of directory and data area in DOS and physical format
(low level format) of the three characters after BPB. Through the information, Boot
strapper or device driver transfer the logical address (DOS sector) into physical address
(absolute sector) in disk.
Relevant Parameters
BPB format, sequence number, offset address, sigificance
1 03H0AH OEM Number
2 0BH0CH Number of bytes in every sector
3 0DH Number of sectors in every cluster
4 0EH0FH Number of reserved sectors
5 10H FAT Number of backups
6 11H12H Number of Boot Directory terms
7 13H14H Total number of sectors in disk
8 15H Description of medium

9 16H17H Number of sectors in every FAT

10 18H19H Number of sectors in every track
11 1AH1BH Heads
12 1CH1FH Number of special implicit sectors
13 20H23H Total number of sectors
14 24H25H Number of physical drives
15 26H
16 27H2AH Serial number of volumes
17 2BH35H Volume labels
18 36H3DH Number of file system
Formulas of DOS Boot Record
Formulas of DOS Boot Record:
FAT Sectors reserved
Boot directory Sectors reserved + number of FAT number of sectors in every FAT
Data area number of logical sectors in Boot Directory + (32number of directory terms in
Boot Directory + (number of bytes in every sector-1)) DIV number of bytes in every sector
Number of absolute sectors number of logical sectors + number of implicit sectors
Number of sectors (number of absolute sectors MOD number of sectors in every track)
+1
Heads (number of absolute sectors DIV number of sectors in every track) MOD number
of head
Number of track (number of absolute sectors DIV number of sectors in every track) DIV
heads