[syslinux] pxelinux / memdisk / afud408 freeze.

[Andrew Stuart]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 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
>   

I *finally* got around to trying this. I tried with a usb pen drive and 
syslinux 3.53 release (w/ matched memdisk).

With my original disk Win95 1.44mb captured with dd or winimage. I 
deleting everything except for what was needed and adding afud408.exe
The problem still persists (with and without flags to memdisk). I did 
how ever get it to work with the FDOEM.144.imz image offered by FreeDOS, 
but only with raw or bigraw flags passed to memdisk.

I don't know if you want to try and troubleshoot this further, at this 
moment I am happy with the above working solution, at the very least I 
wanted to update the list for archival sake.

Thanks again for all the great work hpa!

-Andrew