[syslinux] Boot kernel on a different drive/partition

[Andrew Goodbody]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Andrew Goodbody wrote:
>> Is it possible for syslinux to boot a kernel stored on a different 
>> drive/partition to the one on which syslinux was started from?
> 
> No, it's not.  You can, however, chainload such a partition.
> 
> (Ram has been working on some of that support, however, I'm skeptical to 
> it as it tends to lead down the Grub road of not handling dynamic 
> systems properly.  I would be very interested in the usage case, i.e. 
> why do you think you need this.)

OK the basic scenario is this:

syslinux plus a comboot program in a floppy image integrated into a BIOS
which will do some custom processing before launching the kernel which
will be on an hdd. Actually the kernel may have been loaded into RAM
before it is booted but I still need the comboot program to be able to
read files from the hdd.
I know the comboot program can do what it likes and read the hdd
directly but I want to use the file system support in syslinux rather
than writing that from scratch and if I do that I could almost drop
syslinux entirely anyway.
So I would be happy with a new comboot API function to change what
syslinux thinks of as its default drive. From that point I could access
the files on the hdd.

Thanks,
Andrew