[syslinux] Promise ATA RAID Workaround

[David O'Callaghan]

Hi All,

I'm writing to announce a workaround to the problem with various
Promise ATA RAID controllers, discussed previously on this list and
mentioned on http://syslinux.zytor.com/hardware.php.

To recap, the Promise BIOS overwrites random locations in low memory,
whether booting from it or not. This screws with PXELINUX.

In our case, we got around the problem by disabling the Promise BIOS in
the system BIOS. On the Intel motherboard that we were using it was
labelled "Onboard R-IDE ROM". This means that we can no longer boot
directly from the disks, but Linux still picks up the controller
correctly.

There are some more details here:
http://www.cs.tcd.ie/David.OCallaghan/blog/grid/grid-ireland/gateways.html

Hope this helps someone,

David O'Callaghan