[syslinux] Boot Bug

[H. Peter Anvin]

clif wrote:
> Hi I have noticed that some versions of syslinux later than 1.66 fail to
> install a working boot block on a CF card in Soekris net4521 board. The
> Bios is:
> comBIOS ver. 1.05  20020419  Copyright (C) 2000-2001 Soekris Engineering.
> The card is a 64M Sandisk and I am useing a version of LEAF called
> WISP-dist but I also experianced the same problem with the Bering
> distro. Here is my syslinux.cfg:
> 

As you can probably understand, there is no way in hell I will have
access to this particular hardware.  First of all, please do note that
running SYSLINUX on an unpartitioned harddisk is a hit-or-miss: if the
BIOS correctly clears SI it probably works, but otherwise it will take
whatever DS:SI points to and try to interpret it as partition
information.  This may be your problem.

If that doesn't work, other than debugging the code directly, it would
be helpful if you could narrow down the exact version that breaks,
****including prerelease versions****.

In particular, from looking through the code there was a change between
1.74 and 1.75-pre1 that looks like it might make SYSLINUX more sensitive
to an unpartitioned hard disk.  If you could please test 1.74 and
1.75-pre1 and see if the behaviour changes, I would appreciate it.

	-hpa