Thread: floppy disk boot sector

does the arrangements of the boot sector contents differ in different OS or in different machines.
i wrote a structure to find the contents of boot sector in my machine having XP and i find that the structure gives me different result in another machine having win 98(first edition)

No it doesn't. However, the way you would go about accessing the boot sector would differ depending on OS. You are probably getting different results because you are using a technique that is invalid on Win98 but is valid on WinXP (such as CreateFile()).

thanks for replying. but what i meant was different.
what i meant when i said it was diffrent was that i got the serial number stored in the 39th byte onwards, occupying a space of four bytes(but in the reverse direction). that is 39th byte had the first byte of serial number and the 236th byte starting from the first in the boot sector had the last byte of serail number.
i checked this out by reading the entire the boot sector in an array and inspected it, byte by byte.(this was done in win98 second edition).
the same array when inspected in another machine containing windows 98 first edition gave a an altogether different result.
further, win xp doesn't store at all the volume label in the boot sector. it always gives a "no name" as default. why??