[syslinux] extlinux "boot failed" on older (pentium 3) motherboards

[Nick]

I get this exact message (case preserved):

Boot failed

And nothing more.  It appears right after the second bios screen (the one
that gives the disk/com port/pci info, etc).  It is in the same place
where I should see the "extlinux" line when the booting starts.

I am using the mbr that comes with syslinux (3.07 BTW).

Just for the hell of it, I did a fdisk /mbr.  I ended up with the same
error message.

> Nick wrote:
>> I have 3 older pentium-3 systems (asus cubx, asus cusl2-c) that give a
"boot failed" message when trying to boot with extlinux on a flash card
(which uses an ide converter, so it looks like a regular ide hard drive
to
>> the os & bios).  These worked fine when I used syslinux & fat16.
>
> What's the EXACT message you get?  Also, do you get ANY other output?
Please describe verbatim; this is very important.  Also, which MBR do
you use?
>
>> If I take out the flash card & ide converter and put it in a newer p4
system, it boots fine.  So I would assume that I did the extlinux
install
>> & partitioning just fine.  In fact I have been using it for a while now
with no problems in newer systems, and only now am running into a
problem
>> when I am trying to upgrade some older systems.
>> I was thinking extlinux would boot on any system that syslinux would.  Am
>> I incorrect?  Any ideas?
>
> It *should*, but it's probably tripping on a BIOS bug that somehow
syslinux avoids.  This is very odd, because the code is pretty much
exactly the same.
>
> 	-hpa
>