[syslinux] extlinux issue

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 04/08/2010 01:21 AM, BuraphaLinux Server wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I will try these things on the next site visit, which should be in
> about a month.  I had not considered that the mbr might be 100% blank,
> since the machine was running another distribution before we
> installed.  However, I did change the RAID in the BIOS which may have
> wiped/scrambled the mbr.  Thank you for your insights, and after I
> test that theory I will post to the list either way my results.  We
> upgraded all firmware that was in the HP Firmware Update CD 8.20 since
> I posted last time, and there was a BIOS and a RAID firmware update,
> but they didn't help for this issue.  The mbr issue sounds most
> likely.  For now we installed grub2 (very hard to install) as a
> temporary solution which works, so the hardware is probably ok and I
> just didn't rewrite the mbr after the RAID change.  For us, the entire
> first disk is called /dev/cciss/c0d0.  We did try with just menu.c32,
> but that changed nothing, probably since we never got to run it with
> no mbr.  We normally are using ext3 filesystems, but tried ext2 and it
> didn't make any change.
> 
> Thank you for you help, and sorry I cannot test things immediately
> since I have to wait for the next scheduled site visit.
> 

For what it's worth, I suspect the problem indeed is the lack of MBR.
Changing the BIOS almost certainly scrambled the MBR (together with the
rest of the disk), and if you didn't install the MBR you would
definitely have a problem.

Intel gave me temporary access to a DL360 G4 (not G4p, I don't know what
the difference is) with BIOS version P52 (12/02/2004); I do not see a
problem on that machine.

	-hpa