The section on a disk that contains the minimum information required to start the system.

The boot record begins on track 0, sector 1, side 0 of every diskette formatted by the DOS FORMAT command. The boot record is placed on diskettes to produce an error message if you try to start up the system with a nonsystem diskette or to direct the loading of the rest of the operating system on boot capable disks. For hard disks, the boot record resides on the first sector of the DOS partition. All media supported by DOS use one sector for the boot record.

See also:

• DOS\Command\FORMAT
• DOS\Boots