yes. Dependent on the sectors/cylinder size of the 'hard drive'

newer partitioning schemes actually set aside a lot more space, circa 1MB if my memory is correct.

mike_canada wrote on 2021-07-28, 04:16:

I'm in the middle of creating a bootable FAT16 hard drive image for use with many PC emulators. I then used a binary editor to e […]
Show full quote

I'm in the middle of creating a bootable FAT16 hard drive image for use with many PC emulators.
I then used a binary editor to examine the valid image.
I compared it to a FAT16 image with MBR (master boot record) intact. The data is valid, but what I did notice is that right after the partition table in the MBR, there's 8KB of data that's completely empty.

I can reproduce this setup just by creating a FAT16 image using mkfatimage16 from dosemu package.

When I stripped the 128 byte header of the image (that's strictly for dosemu), and make the image valid for CD booting, I checked the image with fdisk, it shows the starting position is at sector 17.

Is it normal for FAT16 partitions to have such a large empty space (8KB) between the MBR and the first FAT16 partition when using standard partition tools like DOS 6.22 FDISK?

you can add a valid bootsector here (I didn't) or check the comments for FAT16 ...

https://codeberg.org/Asato/swap42

btw. you could skip the empty clusters between mbr und pbr (set the necessary emtries) what I tried first - but MSDOS will ignore it and not recognize it as valid drive

for compatibility/historic reasons MSDOS expects a lot of settings (number of FAT copies) so best is not to touch them even if the papers allow it ..

I ended up contacting the guy who made these pages about my same inquiry:
https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/index.html

He happened to reply faster than just about anyone else. He tells me that all hard drives when formatted with partitions have a big gap between the MBR and the first partition. The gap I discovered in mine is 8KB in side. The guy says that in newer partition setups that feature Windows Vista or later, the gap is at least 1MB in size. I probably wouldn't even use more than 2KB for my needs and because the hard drive in this case is an image file, I don't have to worry about losing real contents.