[syslinux] Failed to boot from one particular system

[H. Peter Anvin]

Juan Cespedes wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Last month we received the following mail from one of our users;
> apparently, his system does not set register DL to the boot drive
> number, so the rest of the process fails.
> 
> Unfortunatelly, I have not been able to contact the sender of this
> mail, so I have not been able to gather more info about his system.
> I will continue trying to contact him.
> 
> Does anyone know how could this be solved in a clean way?
> 
> Thanks,
> 


Unfortunately, his analysis is bogus -- it will cause significant loss 
of functionality to change this behaviour.  This is a classic case of 
"BIOS to braindamaged to live," and I'd loathe at lobotomizing SYSLINUX 
to support just one machine.  This is one of the things that's actually 
fairly reliably done even by otherwise very braindead machines -- this 
is the very first case I've ever heard of a system that's broken in this 
particular way.

The "clean way" to solve it is for him to use his own hacked version of 
SYSLINUX, to get a BIOS upgrade, or to transfer his system to the 
nearest garbage container.

	-hpa