berkus wrote:Floppies by definition have only MBR (because there are no partitions).
You are wrong about that, Master Boot Record is the one that has partitioning table. Even this site's wiki say so:
http://wiki.osdev.org/MBR, as well as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record and, nevertheless the author is clear about this, for example:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/69013
What is the MBR?
At the end of the ROM BIOS bootstrap routine, the BIOS reads and executes the first physical sector of the first floppy or hard disk on the system. This first sector of the hard disk is called the master boot record.
As you can see, only hard disk, not floppies. Floppies have only Volume Boot Record, just like every partition on disk, that _MAY_ contain BPB. BIOS just reads and executes the first physical sector, it does not parse BPB at all, because it's part of the FAT filesystem, not the disk or floppy.
berkus wrote:Edit: and according to wikipedia the BPB makes sense only for a few select elite filesystems anyway.
the page you linked is also clear about it's VBR that may contain BPB, not MBR, and it's also says that BPB is part of the filesystem.