The Reserved Area

The boot sector is actually part of a reserved area that can span from one to several sectors. The reserved-sectors word in the BPB, at offset 0EH in the boot sector, describes the size of this area. Remember that the number in the BPB field includes the boot sector itself, so if the value is 1 (as it is on IBM PC floppy disks), the length of the reserved area is actually 0 sectors.