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Systems & Data Center · Foundational

Master Boot Record (MBR)

A legacy partitioning scheme storing the boot loader and partition table in the first 512-byte sector of a disk.

Definition

MBR supports up to four primary partitions (or three primary plus one extended containing logical partitions) and a maximum addressable size of 2 TiB with 512-byte sectors. It is used with legacy BIOS booting.

Example

fdisk -l shows 'Disklabel type: dos' for an MBR-partitioned disk.

Exam tip

MBR's limits (2 TiB, four primary partitions) are the usual reason to pick GPT instead.

Don't confuse it with

Related terms