[syslinux] syslinux-2.05 boot floppy failures, size related?

[Mikael Pettersson]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 10:41:00 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>Mikael Pettersson wrote:
>> 
>> Observations:
>> 1. It's not a media problem. I've switched floppies and
>>    reformatted them, but the failure persists.
>> 2. It's not a BIOS problem. The latest image that failed
>>    does so on three very different PCs.
>
>What three different PCs?

Yesterday I tested another machine so now there are four:
ASUS P4T-E P4 mobo, BIOS 1007 (latest non-beta)
ASUS P3B-F PIII mobo, BIOS 1008 Beta4 (latest one)
Dell Latitude CPi PII laptop, BIOS A12 (latest one)
Gigabyte GA-60XT-A PIII-Tualatin mobo, recent BIOS

I can test three more machines this weekend.

>> 3. The problem appears to occur for specific image sizes.
>>    The latest failed bzImage is 947503 bytes, but enlarging it
>>    by including more stuff in the kernel allows syslinux to
>>    boot it. (I've booted 1200K+ images often, but syslinux
>>    seems to have problems with around 900K+ and 1100K+ images.)
>> 4. syslinux -s makes no difference at all.
>> 
>> I've put my latest failed bzImage and corresponding 2.6.0-test3
>> .config in http://www.csd.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/syslinux205bug/,
>> in case anyone can debug it. I tried looking at syslinux' source
>> but it's a big pile of assembly so I'm lost there...
>
>Please put floppy images instead.  That way I might be able to reproduce 
>the failure.

Done. The file is 'fdimage' at the URL listed above. It was
produced on RH9 using mtools-3.9.8-7 and syslinux-2.05.

/Mikael