[syslinux] Syslinux Bootsector

martin at weh.rwth-aachen.de martin at weh.rwth-aachen.de
Wed May 15 04:47:51 PDT 2002


Hi!

Facing a strange problem about not being able to access
the floppy drive after booting from a rescue-floppy with
2.2.x kernel on an asus p4te mainboard, i searched the
net and found a bug in the bootsector of the 2.2.x kernels.
Before control is redirected to the kernel, the floppy drive
is shut down in a way, that freezes the FD-Controller on
recent mainboards (like the ASUS P4T-E).
The Syslinux-Bootsector (at least until version 1.72) uses
the same method of "stopping" the floppy; this makes the
installation with multiple floppies impossible.
I'd like to submit a change of the SysLinux Bootsector that
is based on the newer 2.4.x kernel approaches to that problem
and worked fine for me:

;
; Linux wants the floppy motor shut off before starting the kernel,
; at least bootsect.S seems to imply so
;
kill_motor:
              push ax
              push dx
              xor ax,ax
              xor dx,dx
              int 13h
	      pop dx
	      pop ax

instead of

              mov dx,03F2h
	      xor al,al
	      call slow_out

Thx for any comments,
Martin Neuhaeusser

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