[syslinux] Can't boot Syslinux from HD directly. Can indirectly?

[H. Peter Anvin]

Nazo wrote:
> I've installed Syslinux on a somewhat old system.  The motherboard is
> based on an Intel 440GX chipset (specifically it's the Supermicro
> P6DGE if that means anything.)  The harddrive has been split up into
> partitions of one hidden FAT16 (marked as active) to which syslinux is
> installed (hda1), one normal FAT32 which has windows and dos (hda2.) 
> It also has an extended partition containing an EXT2 and linux swap
> partition, however, it didn't originally have these when I first saw
> the problem so I know they aren't the issue.
> 
> The issue is that for some reason it won't boot the harddrive
> directly.  It just freezes every time.  It shows the word SYSLINUX,
> the version (3.09) and date (2005-06-17) but stops there.  Never
> clears the screen or any of that either.  I have installed it in safe
> "slow" mode, but, what's more importantly, this same setup worked
> perfectly fine for several weeks on the previous board I had in that
> system, an Asus KN-97-X (Intel 440FX.)  This leads me to believe it's
> something weird to do with the bios.
> 
> Currently I'm having to boot my rescue disc using isolinux and load
> chain.c32 to manually boot that partition for it to work.  When I do
> this, it boots without a problem.  I'd say definitely bios, however,
> before this latest time I've installed syslinux on there, it was set
> to boot partition "0" (aka the MBR!)  As far as I can tell, it doesn't
> cross the 1024 boundary (I haven't the vaguest idea how to verify
> this, but, the FAT16 partition is the first 510 or so MB of a 60GB
> drive, so it's hard to imagine it would do that.)
> 
> Any idea what's going on?  Is it somehow still past the 1024 boundary?
>  Any way to verify short of knowing how to add up those numbers on the
> drive (which is such a pain to get to right now I'm not sure it's
> worth the trouble.)
> 

Do you know if this problem goes away with an older version of syslinux? 
  There seems to be some issues with newer syslinuxes on some old 
hardware, which is still unresolved.

	-hpa