[syslinux] non-standard boot floppys

[H. Peter Anvin]

Thomas Fanslau wrote:
> I experimented with floppy sizes. Eg. I used FDFORMAT v1.8 to format a Disk
> 
>     fdformat a: t82 s21 D10

I can guess what t82 and s21 do, but D10 is not clear to me.

> (I even have a modified version of FDFORMAT that creates only 1 FAT to 
> save space, but I'm not using that.)
> 
> All the information is written nicely to the Boot-Record
> 
>     http://home.freeuk.com/foxy2k/disk/disk3.htm
> 
> But SYSLINUX seems to ignore the information. While DOS boots fine from 
> these Disks SYSLINUX crashes. I looked a the source code and find no
> place where this information is used ...
> 
> If it's not used by now, I would like to see support for that. I could 
> try to build it in myself, but I'm very closed about who is touching my 
> source code, so you may not like it ... But using this could get 
> floppy-based solutions another 400K so, if you don't want to do it 
> yourself AND consider including my changes, I could try to fit that in.
> 
> I saw that you already read in the boot record. Getting "sector per 
> track" and "tracks per side" for that should be easy ...
> 

It already uses that information.  More likely is that DOS contains a 
workaround for something wrong in your BIOS.  Please make sure you use 
the latest version of SYSLINUX (2.02) so you get the latest workarounds 
in syslinux.

	-hpa