[syslinux] pxelinux / memdisk / afud408 freeze.

[H. Peter Anvin]

Andrew Stuart wrote:
> Has anyone had a problem with afud408 (Award flash program) freezing the 
> system when ran from memdisk?
> The freeze occurs when just running afud408 (not attempting to update 
> bios, although it freezes then as well.)
> 
> I was using pxelinux/memdisk 3.36, I upgrade to 3.51, and also fell back 
> to 2.11 all have the same issue.
> 
> I have tried all the switches for memdisk that I saw posted on the 
> memdisk webpage (non wiki). raw/bigraw caused the image to freeze before 
> even booting. (frozen cursor before loading the boot sector?). The disk 
> image is a Windows 95 boot image that I used winimage to expand to 
> 2.88MB. I use this image for all my bios upgrade needs.
> 
> This seems to occur on a large amount of MSI's latest offerings (w/ 
> award bios) (Specifically: 945gm2, 945gm3 and g965m). I used this same 
> image on a Dell laptop for giggles, and it worked fine (it spit out the 
> usage menu).
> 
> At this point I am sure it's a bios/pxe issue, but does anyone have any 
> suggestions before I try taking the issue up with MSI? Any idea how I 
> can troubleshoot this further, so that I can give them specifics as to 
> why it locked up?
> 
> If it isn't clear, this on 10+ different systems, different hardware, 
> different configurations, all hardware has been tested to be good.
> 

Can you boot MEMDISK from media, as opposed to PXE?  That way we can at
least separate the PXE stack from the rest of the system...

	-hpa