[syslinux] Sysinux 6 will not boot ISOs on BIOS (i.e. pre-UEFI) systems

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Mon Nov 25 13:38:12 PST 2013


On 11/25/2013 02:59 AM, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> Thomas wrote:
>>
>> Nevertheless, this is the first confirmation that BIOS
>> dislikes high block addresses.
>> At least the older versions of mkisofs and genisoimage
>> do not force the boot images to low addresses.
>> I am curious what a mass test with the users will bring.
> 
> From experience of making Debian CDs, we've had bug reports years ago
> about buggy BIOS implementations that won't boot images using high
> LBAs. For ages, we've been simply using two file trees when creating
> CDs, putting boot files into the first one mentioned on the
> mkisofs/genisoimage command line. Since we started doing that
> workaround, things worked much better.
> 

I suspect it is simply a timeout that triggers due to the longer seek.
Seeking on CD-ROMs is very slow.

	-hpa



More information about the Syslinux mailing list