[syslinux] ISOLINUX boot problem: request for help

[Peter Bartke]

H. Peter Anvin schrieb am Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 03:57:27PM -0700:
> Peter Bartke wrote:
> > 
> > This is a Live CD which starts from RAM-disk. Please correct me, if I'm
> > wrong - after seeing the message `Ready.', isolinux.bin transfers control
> > to the vmlinuz in RAM. And the kernel has its initial boot disk in RAM.
> > To me this seems more a RAM problem (finding the entry point?) than a CD 
> > read problem.  By the way, I made a complete mem86 RAM test to exclude 
> > dirty bits.
> > 
> 
> "Ready." is indeed the point at which we transfer control to the kernel
> setup code.  It might be interesting to put "vga=ask" on the kernel
> command line; that should give you some interaction with the kernel
> setup code, which runs in real mode before the kernel is decompressed.
> That will help narrow down the problem.
> 

To further isolate the problem I took slax-6.0.0-rc5.iso - which is one
of those two that produce the boot stall under investigation -  and
replaced the isolinux boot machinery on this disk by the following
minimal grub files:

/boot/grub/stage2_eltorito
/boot/grub/menu.lst:
  default 0
  timeout 60
  color cyan/blue white/blue
  title Slax 6.0 RC5
      root (cd)
      kernel (cd)/boot/vmlinuz init=linuxrc vga=0x31a splash=0 load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0  rw 
      initrd=/boot/initrd.gz

The line
  mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
          -boot-info-table -o slax-6rc5-grub.iso grubcd
built a perfectly bootable iso file!

May I conclude that isolinux.bin (several tested versions up to the
newest) in combination with a linux-2.6.21.5 kernel from the Slax
distribution (Slax 6 RC4/RC5) produces _on some hardware (mine)_ a boot
stall. The other bootloader succeeds on the same hardware.

I should mention that I have really no preferences for any boot loader.
By the way, the used grub in this experiment was the legacy one, `flawed
by design' ...

Peter
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