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PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 08 2022, @08:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the PC-introns dept.

owl writes:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/unidentified-pc-dos-1-1-boot-sector-junk-identified/

Anyone trying to disassemble the PC DOS 1.1 boot sector soon notices that at offsets 1A3h through 1BEh there is a byte sequence that just does not belong. It appears to be a fragment of code, but it has no purpose in the boot sector and is never executed. So why is the sequence of junk bytes there, and where did it come from?

The immediate answer is "it came from FORMAT.COM". The junk is copied verbatim from FORMAT.COM to the boot sector. But those junk bytes are not part of FORMAT.COM, either. So the question merely shifts to "why are the junk bytes in FORMAT.COM, and where did they come from?"

It is not known if anyone answered the question in the past, but the answer has been found now, almost 40 years later—twice independently.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @12:12AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @12:12AM (#1211162)
    After all, given things like comments not updating again, the old farts would probably have ab easier time maintaining the site if it we're using DOS - more their comfort zone. And with the newer dos protected mode extenders that can use a 4gig address space …
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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 10 2022, @06:26PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 10 2022, @06:26PM (#1211570) Journal

    Don't judge me for reading the article . . .

    Note that in the PC DOS 1.0 boot sector, the strange zero-termination is combined with high-bit-termination, and the strings ‘ibmbio com0’ and ‘ibmdos com0’ are each stored with the last byte as B0h, which is ASCII ‘0’ (30h) + 80h. In PC DOS 1.1, the high bit is no longer set.

    I think this practice of zero terminating strings using an ASCII zero character '0' (30h) with the high bit set (XOR 80h) should be a new standard way of encoding strings.

    --
    Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?