[syslinux] Survey: SYSLINUX: 2.13 works, 3.0x don't (H. Peter Anvin)

[Arwin Vosselman]

On Fri Aug  5 15:13:18 2005, in  you wrote:

>Okay, just checking.  It was a bit of a flash from the past.
>
>At this point, it seems we have a few possibilities, none of them very 
>good.  At least the latest attempt gave us an error before bailing, 
>which we might be able to do something with.

As this subject is spread over several threads I just hang this on where
I think it might be appropriate.

The problems described were also found with fli4l. There is a mixture of
details that don't say much besides newer hardware seems to work ok,
older not.

I started to do some testing and found something interesting that might
be a kind of clue or not.

Hardware: MB Chaintech 5AGM2, BIOS Award v4.51PG, HDD 6GB.

If the disk is empty (no partitions at all) the BIOS-Screen at startup
shows the Disk to be LBA.
With a small partition as used by fli4l (approx. 30MB) the screen at
startup shows CHS (for the same disk).

My suspicion is that the BIOS is still reporting LBA at INT13 41 but
actually is handling the disk as CHS.

Needless to say 3.10 won't boot with the known banner-message.

-- 
HTH,
Regards,
Arwin.