[syslinux] memdisk and usb flash devices as primary hard drives.

[H. Peter Anvin]

Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Quinn wrote:
> 
> 
>>Addendum to the above tests:
>>
>>I just tried booting a gzipped compressed hard disk image with the usb key in
>>- same problem - hangs just after memdisk
>>loads the image to ram and tries to boot.  If I take the key out, then the
>>problem goes away.
>>
>>Also, after re-reading the subject line - I can see that it might be misread
>>incorrectly.
>>It should probably be read as "memdisk with usb flash devices as primary hard
>>drives."
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> You're not the only one with problems. I have not talked to anyone who was 
> able to boot memdisk/DOS and some other OSes using USB. (Linux 2.4 
> seems to work, most others don't) hpa says this is a bug with certain 
> BIOSes, still it is weird that Linux can work around it.
> 

Linux doesn't use the BIOS, though.  If you have a bootloader on a disk 
image the bootloader might use the BIOS, though.

I kind of suspect this is related to the same problem that causes 
MEMDISK to fail to boot WinME/WinXP DOS images.  Unfortunately I don't 
see myself having time to debug that one for the forseeable future.

	-hpa