[syslinux] Problems booting with SCSI CD (fwd)

[H. Peter Anvin]

[Putting this thread back on the list, since the Cc: before was broken.
 To the list: Theodore has a machine with an old Adaptec SCSI BIOS, and
can't boot ISOLINUX off a CD-ROM.]

Theodore Kilgore wrote:
> 
> You are right again. I tried this little change and it still doesn't work.
> But now we come back to what seems to me is a very major question: The
> machine boots just fine from an 18G SCSI drive (and hence off of the very
> broken BIOS) once I do get Linux installed on it. And both machine BIOS
> and SCSI BIOS are set to permit booting from CD-ROM. And the CD-ROM
> clearly does get seen and read, upon attempting to boot (else where are
> the debug messages coming from, which are obviously written into
> isolinux-debug.bin?). So how come that sucker won't boot?
> 

Because the CD-ROM portion of the SCSI BIOS is buggy -- which doesn't
mean completely non-functional.  The interesting thing about your
particular case is that it's quite possible a workaround can be found,
but it's very hard to guess remotely, and it's important that that
workaround doesn't break anything else.

Another important question: can you boot either the Win2K or WinXP
install CDs on this machine?  (Any other version of Windows doesn't count.)

> Question: When you say the BIOS is "broken" you presumably mean the SCSI
> BIOS which is presumably installed in a chip which sits on the Adaptec
> 2940 card? Or do you mean the BIOS on the motherboard? If necessary or
> desirable I could temporarily hook up an IDE CD to one of these boxes in
> order to check out whether it can boot or not.

I bet if you hook up an IDE CD it would boot just fine.

	-hpa