[syslinux] ISOLINUX boot problem: request for help

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Thu Jul 26 12:30:21 PDT 2007


Peter Bartke wrote:
> 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. 

You are aware that burnable CDs don't necessarily "work" or "not work";
it's fairly common for them to be marginal so that they work in some
machines, but not others, right?

Since you can boot the offending machine, I would try to dd the CD to an
image *on the failing machine* and compare it to the raw image.  That
doesn't necessarily imply things are hunky-dory, but it's something.

> 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.

What it looks like to me is that ISOLINUX reads the data in question,
but gets corruption from the BIOS.  What kernel version are you trying
to boot?

	-hpa




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