Master boot record

And what that means is that's the partition table.

So when you first plug in your drive, you'll get a prompt that says, hey, do you want GPT or MBR? Sometimes it's DOS and Linux.

MBR is kind of how Windows refers to it.

But you'll get those prompts.

And if it's a large drive, it needs to be GPT.

And I've already talked about the size limitation.

But those are the main differences between the two.

MBR is kind of like the just quick, dirty way of doing things.

I see my thumb drive.

I see GPT and MBR.

I do not see...

FAT32.

Because the concepts people carry around aren't wrong, they're just old.

The BIOS, the MBR, the boot order menu, the CSM setting you toggle when an install fails.

Some of that's dead, some of it's still doing work, and one piece of it was never what people think it was in the first place.

And the PC ones cleanly separated, because they get mashed together constantly, is UEFI versus secure boot.

440 bytes of code, no file system awareness, no real partition table awareness beyond whatever the boot code implements itself.

Then that tiny thing chain loads a second stage from somewhere else.

The gap after the MBR, a volume boot record, or on a GPT disk, a dedicated GRUB BIOS boot partition.

440 bytes.