[syslinux] Problems booting with SCSI CD

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Thu Oct 31 20:43:58 PST 2002


Theodore Kilgore wrote:
> 
> I have burned several Slackware 8.1 bootable CDs which work nicely on
> any IDE CD-ROM setup, provided the machine's BIOS is new enough to
> support booting from CD. But on these Gateway machines the following:
> 
> 1. BIOS sees the SCSI devices -- one SCSI hard drive and one SCSI
> CD-ROM.
> 2. BIOS reports that the CD is bootable.
> 3. The message comes up about "winging it" and then the next line says
> there is a failure to "access" the CD-ROM device (Strange,because these
> error messages were read from the CD, right?).
> 
> Thus, I cannot even get so far as a "Boot:" prompt, which would let me
> choose the correct boot kernel for using that particular SCSI card (for
> Slackware 8.1 that is the adaptec.s kernel).
> 

This means that the BIOS read the initial bootstrap off the CD, but that 
then it cannot get the BIOS to read anything else.  Please specify the 
*exact* output messages displayed -- the exact details are important in 
trying to figure out what is happening on your machine without actually 
having access to it.

The one thing you can do is burn a CD with isolinux/isolinux.bin 
replaced with isolinux/isolinux-debug.bin; see 
http://syslinux.zytor.com/iso.php for details on how you would have to 
use mkisofs.

	-hpa




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