[syslinux] Syslinux and Asus P4B

[Alexander Holt]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> Markus Tavenrath <speedygoo at speedygoo.de> said:
>
> > i found out that Syslinux has a problem with Asus P4B Board. Even if
> > I use the -s compability option i get always 'Boot failed'.
> 
> Which bios version are you using? Did you try a newer one? Is this
> with bootable CDs or from a floppy? Did you try to replace the board?
> 
> syslinux should work with almost all boards, and the ones it doesn't
> work at all have a quite broken bios. So please give all details you
> can get your hand on.

I have encountered this problem as well.  In fact, doing a bit of
searching, it seems so have quite a few others, going back at least to
last October.  See, for example,

    <http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=9f45242e.0110052352.40d02e20%40posting.google.com&hl=en>
    <http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=NDBBJAPHILGMFFOLGOKIEEHCCJAA.bmartin%40joaptsc.navy.mil&hl=en>
    <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=40223>

It only seems to occur with ASUS P4B boards and certain bootable
floppies.  Bootable CDs are fine.  Looks like it's a BIOS bug.  This
ASUS board comes with Award Medallion BIOS 6.0.  The bug is present in
at least board BIOS revisions 1004 and 1005.

The bootloaders that fail seem to be

    SYSLINUX
    whatever OpenBSD boot floppies use
    whatever IBM-DOS boot floppies use

I've tried with SYSLINUX 1.52 (as currently used by Red Hat) and
SYSLINUX 1.67.  Unfortunately, I don't have the expertise to debug this
much further myself (though I'm happy to try new versions, run debug
suites, etc.).  But it would be good to find out what SYSLINUX needs to
do to work around this apparent BIOS bug.  LILO at least works fine with
this ASUS board.

Alexander Holt
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6

iD8DBQE8iIodZVggDq4Uh5YRAjCkAJ99h4cfzanwNty4u8418zgBth2rSQCcDbU2
DxIHrWHfu5KloDoHGZkN/Uk=
=lIJE
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----