[syslinux] ISOLINUX boot problem: request for help

Peter Bartke bartke at mi.fu-berlin.de
Thu Jul 26 11:53:55 PDT 2007


Hi,

I am trying to track down a ISOLINUX boot problem on my workhorse computer.
Booting  slax-6.0.0-rc5.iso from www.slax.org (a live distro) from CD gives the
following messages:

Loading /boot/vmlinuz ...........
Loading /boot/initrd.gz ............
Ready.
_

Silence. The next message should be, but does not appear:
Uncompressing Linux ...........
This message appears with the same CD on an old Pentium III, so the CD is not
broken, it boots perfectly on the old PC.  I discussed the problem on the Slax
forum but I seem to be the only one with this problem. 

The computer is a P4 on ASUS P5GD2, 1GB RAM, AMI BIOS, 3 SATA disks, DVD-ROM,
CD-RW.  It _successfully_ boots from disk several SuSE distros, Slackware 12
and the unchanged content of the incriminated CD, written to an empty
partition, with the following GRUB-menu.lst entry:

title Slax 6.0 RC5
    root (hd1,5)
    kernel (hd1,5)/boot/vmlinuz init=linuxrc vga=0x31a splash=verbose \
           load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0  rw 
    initrd (hd1,5)/boot/initrd.gz

So I know the kernel on the failing CD is bootable. The corresponding
isolinux.cfg entry on the CD is

  LABEL slax
  MENU LABEL Slax Text mode
  KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz
  APPEND vga=normal initrd=/boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw

I tried isolinux.bin from three versions of syslinux, including the newest. I
tried to get more info by running isolinux-debug.bin from syslinux-3.51,
resulting in permanently the same messages (see above) and a boot stall
afterwards.

I would very much appreciate any hints how to proceed further isolating the
cause of the failure.

Regards,
Peter 





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