[syslinux] USB key: CBIOS line printed, nothing else

Josh Lehan jlehan at scyld.com
Wed Sep 6 15:55:27 PDT 2006


H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Correct.  However, some BIOSes have been reported having "holes" in 
> their coverage of USB media, meaning sectors in the middle that they 
> can't, for some reason, access.  It's hard to believe, I know, but 
> apparently true.

Wow!  BIOS writers continue to amaze me.

> That would actually be very difficult, since syslinux -s just patches a 
> single byte in the syslinux binary.

Ah, I didn't know that.

> One thing you might be able to do is to boot (Free)DOS and poke at INT 
> 13h from debug.  Use Ralf Brown's Interrupt List as the reference.

If I could get this wacky BIOS to boot my USB key with anything, 
including FreeDOS, I would :)

>> I'd prefer not to use EXTLINUX if possible, because it's also handy to 
>> have my USB key easily accessible from Windows.
> 
> I might be a useful data point though.

OK, if I decide to redo my USB key at some point in the future, I'll put 
EXTLINUX on it and try again.  I will also try FAT16, as somebody else 
said.  I'm happy with the content on my USB key now, though.

> A lot of BIOSes has CBIOS vs EBIOS on a device-by-device basis.  For 
> example, almost no BIOSes support EBIOS for floppy drives (the way the 
> spec is written, you get the feeling that the guys at Phoenix thought 
> that EBIOS wasn't implementable for floppy drives.)

Interesting.  That's good that SYSLINUX prints the text message, then, 
so you can know what level of support the BIOS has decided to give your 
device.

Josh




More information about the Syslinux mailing list