[syslinux] Problem booting from CF/SD cards and USB Flashdrives using syslinux

c.lee111 at gmail.com c.lee111 at gmail.com
Thu Aug 23 18:23:58 PDT 2007


On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> c.lee111 at gmail.com wrote:
> > 
> > This one. It only applied to really old versions of lilo  from before
> > 2000 or so and was fixed in newer versions of lilo ages ago.
> > 
> 
> And, pray tell, what made you think that syslinux is affected by this?
> 
> Syslinux has *never* used static determination of geometry, except on
> floppies.  Syslinux 3.00+ will use EBIOS (LBA) if available.
> 
> 	-hpa
> 
Well something  is going on that has to do with the geometry of SD/CF 
cards and USB Flashdrives and I don't think it all has to do with with 
the BIOS USB ZIP issue either. I'm tending to think Syslinux maybe 
is  touchy in reguards to what drive geometry (number of cylinders 
in particular) a usb SD/CF card or USB flashdrive is formatted with.

Like I said before it's pretty much the only thing that would explain 
why usb cards and flashdrives  I formatted to be bootable under windows 
98 would boot, (and they weren't patitioned using zip drive or floppy 
geometry) but the same cards and drives wouldn't boot on the same 
machine using syslinux untill I went and changed the card or drive 
geometry to either 64 32 or 255 63 using mkdiskimage under linux, which 
basically changed the number of cylinders from being over 1024 to 
being under 1024.





 







More information about the Syslinux mailing list