[syslinux] Report: Acer Travelmat stupid MBR check
Gert Hulselmans
gerth at zytor.com
Thu Dec 23 06:21:12 PST 2010
Just in case we get a report like this when the Syslinux MBR is used
together with an Acer Travelmate:
============================================================================
I have an Acer Travelmate and had the known “Unregistered Exception
Handler” error at boot time.
Short Explanation:
The laptop starts up bios and when the bios wants to boot from any media
(not even your harddisk) the exception is thrown.
Reason:
The Diskcryptor MBR starts with 0xeb(jmp). The original M$ mbr starts with
0x33(xor ax,ax).
Some bioses(like mine) try to detect if a drive has a MBR or if it is a
removable drive without MBR.
Very simple here:
Sector0,Position0==0x33 => MBR => normal partitioned harddisk.
Sector0,Position0==0xeb => Boot Sector assumed => emulate a hard disk(this
is what makes usb-sticks without mbr bootable as harddisks, and makes my
acer crash)
============================================================================http://reboot.pro/10503/page__pid__92239#entry92239
- Gert Hulselmans
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