[syslinux] [memdisk] remote boot fails: Non-System disk error

[Salman Haq]

Peter, thanks for the reply.

I specified "h=2 s=18" and memdisk correctly auto discovered #cylinders 
as 920. But that still doesn't do the trick.

When I do a 'cat' on the 16MB image and looks at the first few pages on 
the screen, it looks identical to the original 1.44 MB image. So I 
guess the boot sector is being copied correctly. But then why does the 
big image appear to be a non-system disk?

Thanks again,

Salman


On Jan 13, 2005, at 3:22 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> Salman Haq wrote:
>> Hello People,
>> I'm trying to boot a Mini-ITX system using PC-DOS. I had a working 
>> bootable floppy (1.44MB) for PC-DOS that I used as a starting point.
>> I used 'dd' to create an image of the floppy and used it to remote 
>> boot my client. It worked fine.
>> Then I created a new blank image that is ~16Mb and copied (using dd) 
>> the floppy image onto the new image. This image, which I believe is 
>> identical to the floppy image except that it is much bigger failed to 
>> boot. The message I got at the end was "Non-System disk or disk error 
>> / Replace and press any key when ready"
>> I don't understand what is causing this error. My hunch is that it is 
>> Cylinder/Head/Sector issue.
>
> Yes, if you read the documentation you find that it derives floppy vs 
> hard disk and the C/H/S geometry from the size of the file.
>
> If you specify "floppy h=2 s=18" on the command line it will probably 
> work.
>
> 	-hpa
>