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

[Nazo]

On 8/2/05, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> Nazo wrote:
> > Sure, I don't mind testing it out on there for you, but, where do I
> > find the pre releases to try then?
> 
> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/Testing/
> 
> > At least we know it's between 2.13 and 3.00.  That narrows it a bit I
> > would think.  Mind you, if it jumps up a major revision number, I
> > guess that means a lot of changes went in.
> 
> Indeed.  I believe (sorry, I'm still not swapped back in really) that
> someone else indicated 3.00-pre1 was the first one that broke it (note
> that both 2.20-preX and 3.00-preX are between 2.13 and 3.00).
> 
>         -hpa
> 

(Sorry I messed up the subject and all.  I'm not used to mailing lists.)

The results of my testing are that version 2.13 official works just
fine.  Versions 2.20 pre 1-13 say "Boot failed" and the system stops. 
Versions 2.20 pre14 up to the latest Syslinux show the name and
version number, then stop.  My guess -- and this is just a guess -- is
that they all have the same problem with this system, just the older
2.20s had code realized something went wrong and would say so to the
user.  I emphasise that this is a guess because perhaps, for all I
know, it could instead be possible that some part of the bios realizes
that something is wrong with those earlier versions and informs me,
but I haven't seen it do that on anything else, so that may not be
true.  I didn't see any versions between 2.13 official and 2.20 pre1
to test with, but, I'm inclined to say whatever happened -- at least,
the part my test system doesn't like -- happened in the transition
from 2.13 to 2.20, which is still a pretty large version jump, so I'm
guessing some large changes still went in, yes?

Unfortunately, I can't tell you for sure what systems this applies to
or if it may just be the one since the only other old system I ever
had to test on, the KN-97-X with the Pentium 2, works fine with even
the latest version.  I will tell you one thing though.  I was
impressed with the fact that the Supermicro board supported a lot of
things BIOSes are officially supposed to support but so often don't,
such as the localboot -1 command in isolinux (which, btw, is the
latest version, but, I guess that it works pretty differently from
syslinux as far as bios booting goes.)