[syslinux] ONTIMEOUT LOCALBOOT -1 and menu.c32 -

[Nathaniel Griswold]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 04:54:21PM -0600, Nazo wrote:
> On 12/27/05, Nathaniel Griswold <griswold at upl.cs.wisc.edu> wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 01:55:24PM +0100, Harald_Jensas at Dell.com wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I am having some problem with LOCALBOOT and menu.c32
> > > Anyone who can see what I am doing wrong?
> >
> Like when he selects "Boot from harddrive" from the menu, the
> ontimeout should boot the harddrive correctly rather than reloading
> the menu.
> 
> If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that what's going on here is that
> menu.c32 actually supports and handles localboot.  Last I checked,
> syslinux & extlinux don't actually support localboot.  Mind you, "last
> I checked" applies to a good number of versions ago when it was in the
> todo list, and perhaps it has been implemented by now?  Anyway, so
> far, the only sure-fire way I've ever found to boot the harddrive is
> to use chain.c32.  It's not 100% perfect since some systems out there
> don't boot from the "first harddrive" (in particular SATA I think
> would show up more along the lines as hd4 if you turn on IDE
> emulation, or perhaps not at all if you don't turn it on.)  At least
> it can be manually specified while localboot just simply fails on many
> bioses (such as one of my systems.)

yes, it doesn't really seem like using the -1 argument would be
a consistent thing to depend on ...

LOCALBOOT type [ISOLINUX, PXELINUX]
    On ISOLINUX, the "type" specifies the local drive number to
    boot from; 0x00 is the primary floppy drive and 0x80 is the
    primary hard drive. The special value -1 causes ISOLINUX to
    report failure to the BIOS, which, on recent BIOSes, should
    mean that the next boot device in the boot sequence should
    be activated. 

it all seems kind of inconsistent. is there even a good way to do
this on all (even older) bioses

-nate