[syslinux] memdisk from 3.36 crashing on Dell PowerEdge 1955

[Andreas Kotes]

Hello,

* Andreas Kotes <count at flatline.de> [20070313 12:17]:
> * H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> [20070312 23:56]:
> > Andreas Kotes wrote:
> > >* H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> [20070312 23:15]:
> > >>>uhm - that's not what I meant :) both 3.36 and 3.40-pre12 fail, so .. a
> > >>>memdisk with more debugging information would be appreciated :)
> > >>What you see is what you get, sorry; the fact that you don't even get a 
> > >>"Loading" indicates the failure is in syslinux and not in memdisk, and 
> > >>that it dies on some pretty fundamental level.
> > >
> > >whoops? that is strange. linux kernels get loaded okay.
> > >
> > >any recommendations at all, or am I simply out of luck?
> > 
> > That is indeed extremely weird, because as far as syslinux is concerned, 
> > memdisk *IS* a Linux kernel.  I really have no good explanation for 
> > this!  One thing you could try is to specify a mem= option and tweak it 
> > a bit; that will make syslinux load the disk image in different places. 
> >  However, I find it hard to see *at all* how it could fail before 
> > showing something like:
> > 
> > Loading memdisk.....
> > Loading image.......................... Ready.
> 
> btw, it's pxelinux, not syslinux - and it is requesting the memdisk from
> the TFTP server okay .. I will try the mem= stuff some time the next
> days.
> 
> Thanks for pointing in a useful direction for debugging ;)

... hand me a brown bag, please ...

The fact that I've renamed 'memdisk' to 'memdisk.bin' broke the loading
.. now, loading works, but booting doesn't - neither with safeint nor
with various memory settings ... raw or bigraw just boot the machine
when trying to start the image :(

MEMDISK 3.36 0x45ce2f4c  Copyright 2001-2007 H. Peter Anvin
e820: 0000000000000000 00000000000a0000 1
e820: 0000000000010000 00000000cfea8000 1
e820: 00000000cffa8000 000000000000fc00 3
e820: 00000000cffb7c00 0000000000048400 2
e820: 00000000e0000000 0000000010000000 2
e820: 00000000fe000000 0000000002000000 2
e820: 0000000100000000 0000000130000000 1
Ramdisk at 0xcfb1a000, length 0x0046e000
command line: initrd=firmwares/diag-Dell-PowerEdge-1955.img BOOT_IMAGE=memdisk
Disk is hard disk 0, 4536 K, C/H/S = 9/16/63, EDD
Total size needed = 2370 bytes, allocating 3K
Old dos memory at 0x9e800 (map says 0xa0000), loading at 0x9dc00
1588: 0xffff  15E801: 0x3c00 0xceb1
INT 13 08: Success, count = 1, BPT = 0000:0000
old: int13 = ca000870  int15 = f000f859
new: int13 = 9dc00008  int15 = 9dc00376
Loading boot sector... booting...

... and then nothing ... I've no idea what to try now .. unless you've
got any suggestions, I'll drop a mail to Dell Support tomorrow ...

Best regards,

   Andreas

P.S: this was manually hacked from screen - expect typos :-/

-- 
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -- H.L.Mencken